TABLE OF CONTENTS 
The formation and use of teams is an art form for corporate America.
Business Week, November 1, 1993, p. 160
Some uses of alternative project teams are described in Chap. 19, Continuous Improvement through Projects. Today, an approach to the management of many initiatives in the enterprise can be facilitated by the use of a series of different projects and project teams that serve different purposes for dealing with change in an organization. Some of these teams are similar to project teams; others go beyond the traditional use of project teams.
In this chapter, both traditional and nontraditional project teams are reviewed. The use of such teams centers around such matters as market assessment, competitive analysis, ascertaining organizational strengths and weaknesses, stakeholder evaluation, and senior-level decision making, to name a few. The chapter concludes with a look at how some of the traditional roles carried out by people in the organization have been changed by the use of alternative project teams.
[1]In preparing this chapter the authors drew from David I.Cleland, chap. 1, Strategic Management of Teams (New York: Wiley, 1996).
Teams are becoming commonplace. The use of teams in dealing with operational and strategic change is an idea whose time has come. Alternative teams are becoming key elements in the design of contemporary organizational forms. Cross-functional and cross-organizational work has become...
