Steven L. Johnson
What’s the best way to organize a team of experts working on a knowledge-intensive project? Should they be hierarchical and centralized? Or will a flexible, decentralized, self-organizing team perform better?
McIntire IT Professor Steven L. Johnson, along with colleagues Sri Kudaravalli of HEC Paris and Samer Faraj of McGill University, describes how to get experts to work together effectively in a May 10, 2017, Harvard Business Review article. Studying 71 software development teams in a large U.S. technology company, the three found that the highest-performing teams used a different configuration of expertise depending on the needs of the project phase, decentralizing expertise during design and centralizing expertise during implementation.
