C205 Task 1 Team Design and Structure Example

Seven People, Forty Sites, One Go-Live Date: Designing the Structure, Roles and Influence Strategy of a Cross-Functional Team to Roll Out Inventory Software for a Composite Hospital Supply Company

Student Name

School of Business, Western Governors University

C205: Leading Teams, Task 1

Course Instructor

Month Day, Year

Seven People, Forty Sites, One Go-Live Date: Designing the Structure, Roles and Influence Strategy of a Cross-Functional Team to Roll Out Inventory Software for a Composite Hospital Supply Company

The Team's Purpose

Meridian Medical Supply, a composite distributor, manages supply rooms for 40 hospital and surgery center customers. Its current inventory system relies on handheld scanners and nightly uploads, and customers have complained about stockouts of surgical supplies and inaccurate counts. Leadership has purchased cloud-based inventory software with real-time tracking and has asked me, as director of customer operations, to form a team to roll it out to all 40 sites within nine months, without disrupting a single scheduled surgery. The team's purpose, stated in one sentence, is to have every site running accurately on the new system by the go-live date, with customers' clinical staff trained and confident.

Research on team effectiveness emphasizes that a compelling direction, a clear and consequential purpose, is one of the conditions that most shapes how well a team performs (Hackman, 2002). Starting with purpose also clarifies what the team does not own: the software vendor configures the system, and IT maintains it, so the team's work is implementation, training and adoption.

Factors in Creating the Team

Several factors shaped the design. The task is interdependent: warehouse, IT, customer service and clinical training work cannot be done in sequence by separate departments without delays. The work is spread across 40 sites in three states, so the team must coordinate remotely much of the time. Skills are specialized; no one person understands inventory data, hospital workflows, the software and customer relationships. The deadline is fixed, since contracts with two health systems require the new system by year end. And the stakes are high, because a supply error in a hospital can delay surgery. These factors point to a cross-functional team with clear roles, a small core and the ability to bring in specialists when needed.

Structure and Size

I considered three structures. A large steering committee with representatives from every department would include everyone but decide slowly. Separate functional teams coordinated by a project manager would keep expertise together but create handoffs between departments. A small cross-functional core team with an extended network of specialists balances the two. A review of a decade of team research describes team effectiveness as the result of inputs, such as composition and structure, working through processes and emergent states, such as coordination and trust, to produce outcomes (Mathieu et al., 2008); a smaller core makes those processes easier to build, because each member has fewer relationships to maintain.

The chosen structure is a core team of seven with an extended network. The core meets daily during rollout weeks and weekly otherwise. Extended members, including hospital supply chain managers at each site and vendor engineers, join for specific phases.

Roles and Interactions

Each core role owns a defined outcome. The team lead, myself, owns the timeline, escalations and communication with executives. The implementation manager, from operations, owns the site-by-site rollout schedule. The data lead, from IT, owns converting item masters and counts so that each site starts with accurate data. The clinical liaison, a former operating room nurse on our customer success staff, owns training for hospital staff and represents clinical concerns. The field lead, a senior warehouse supervisor, owns the physical change at each supply room. The customer relationship manager owns communication with customer executives. The vendor coordinator owns the relationship with the software company.

Interactions are designed around handoffs. For each site, the data lead signs off on data before the field lead schedules go-live, and the clinical liaison confirms training is complete before the supply room switches over. A shared tracker shows every site's status, so members can see where their work fits.

Influence and Power

As team lead, I have limited formal authority over most members, who report to other directors. French and Raven (1959) described five bases of social power: legitimate, reward, coercive, expert and referent. Legitimate and reward power are limited here; coercive power would damage the cooperation the team needs. I will rely mainly on expert power, grounded in my knowledge of our customers' operations, and referent power, built through relationships and credibility. In practice, this means consulting members before decisions in their areas, crediting their work to their own directors and executives, and removing obstacles they cannot remove themselves. I will also help members use their own expert power; for example, the clinical liaison's authority with hospital staff is greater than mine, so she will lead conversations about workflow changes in operating rooms.

Building the Team in Its First Weeks

The team's first month is devoted to forming. We will hold a two-day kickoff in person, the only time all core members will be together, to agree on the purpose, roles, decision rules and norms, such as responding to messages within four working hours and raising problems early. Early psychological safety matters. In a field study of 51 teams at one manufacturer (Edmondson, 1999), teams where people could own up to errors and request help without embarrassment did more of the things that produce learning, from asking for input to talking through what went wrong, and those teams performed better. I will model it by describing my own mistakes in past rollouts and by thanking members who raise problems. The first two sites, chosen because their supply managers are supportive, will serve as pilots, and the team will hold a review after each before scaling up. Those reviews will ask three questions: what went as planned, what did not and what the team will change for the next site. Findings will be written into a site playbook that grows with each go-live, so that the tenth site benefits from everything learned at the first nine.

Conclusion

The team's design follows from its purpose and the factors that shape the work: interdependent, specialized, distributed and high-stakes. A small cross-functional core with an extended network, clear roles tied to outcomes, designed handoffs, influence based on expertise and relationships, and an early investment in trust give the team the best chance of bringing 40 sites onto the new system on time and without disrupting patient care.

References

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

French, J. R. P., Jr., & Raven, B. (1959). The bases of social power. In D. Cartwright (Ed.), Studies in social power (pp. 150-167). University of Michigan.

Hackman, J. R. (2002). Leading teams: Setting the stage for great performances. Harvard Business School Press.

Mathieu, J., Maynard, M. T., Rapp, T., & Gilson, L. (2008). Team effectiveness 1997-2007: A review of recent advancements and a glimpse into the future. Journal of Management, 34(3), 410-476. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206308316061