All of TeamIT’s industry partners have a strong focus on R&D, and share an explicit need for developing new knowledge and strategies for handling team-intensive organizational models with collaborative leadership. The industry partners represent diverse domains (telecom, IT-consultancy services, shipping and certification). The following companies make up TeamIT’s industry partners:

• Comptel Communications AS (also the Project Owner toward the Norwegian Research Council)
• Bekk Consulting
• DNV Software
• Acando

TeamIT’s primary objective is to achieve effective teamwork and coordination across teams in software development projects in the Norwegian and Global  ICT industry by providing research-based knowledge and innovations.

The project has the following secondary objectives in order to achieve the primary objective:

1. To establish effective autonomous teamwork practices and mechanisms for coordination across such teams within the participating companies.
2. To develop a toolbox with research-based methods, techniques, guidelines and training programmes.
3. To create new scientific knowledge on socio-technical factors in software projects. 
4. To transfer technology and knowledge regarding effective teamwork and coordination across teams to the Norwegian ICT industry and research community.
5. To strengthen the collaboration with leading international research and industry communities.
6. To educate one industry-based PhD candidate.
   

Roles – Companies and Researches

Since knowledge and learning constitute the core of innovation processes, the overall research method is action research, where researchers and practitioners work jointly on developing and testing innovations in a local context. This means a cogenerative learning process in which researchers and corporate partners collaborate to research, understand, and resolve problems of mutual interest. Such a process ensures commitment, quality, and relevance of the project’s research-based innovation activities.
We will follow the Cogenerative Action Research Model , a reflective model, which identifies two main groups of actors: the insiders and the outsiders of the organization. The insiders are the focal point of the action research; they “own” the problem. The outsiders, on the other hand, are the professional researchers who seek to facilitate a co-learning process aimed at solving local problems.

Exploitation of Results

The results from TeamIT will improve the ability to deliver higher quality software in a more predictable fashion by advancing the state-of-the-art of team-based software practices. These results will enhance the business processes of the participating companies and of the national and international ICT industry in general. The knowledge gained from TeamIT will strengthen the competence of the research partners and make important theoretical and empirical contributions to the international scientific community. This will trigger further research and industrial projects. The underlying idea of TeamIT’s exploitation of results is an interaction between the three innovation levels laid down in Section 1, together with the achieved scientific results.

• Company level: TeamIT’s researchers and industry partners will join forces to solve the concrete challenges specific to each industry partner. These challenges are the ones identified in Section 12 and are perceived by the partners themselves as those most pressing in their adaptation of a team-centred collaborative leadership-style organization. This will provide immediate value-creating renewal within each participating company.
• National level: The concrete research, experience and development conducted at each company will provide the project with real-world data. This data will be used analytically to provide the Norwegian research and industry community with leading-edge knowledge and technology for effective teamwork and coordination across teams. This will give the Norwegian ICT industry an invaluable competitive advantage in the world ICT market.
• International level: TeamIT will work on the international research front, by systematizing project data together with empirical data from other international scientific research in the area. TeamIT will publish these results in the world leading scientific journals and conferences. The PhD work will be integrated into the scientific efforts. TeamIT will provide a research-based toolbox that packages process and product innovations for use in the global ICT industry. Moreover, scientific and theoretical underpinnings will provide insights into the underlying socio-technological mechanisms of within and between team interactions. The insights gained at the international level are crucial for drawing the correct conclusions at the company and national levels, and for further development of the toolbox.

The potential for exploitation of results at each level is high. However, the essential gain of TeamIT comes through the levels complementing and cross-fertilizing each other. The exploitation of TeamIT’s results will strengthen the participating companies’ international competitive advantages and will stimulate the companies’ level of ambition for improved R&D activities. This will, in turn, trigger new R&D initiatives in the Norwegian and global ICT sector.

Innovation/degree of novelty

The main innovation in TeamIT is a toolbox that packages process and product solutions targeted to establish more effective teamwork and better coordination across software teams. The toolbox represents a fundamental and significant innovation to the state-of-the-art globally. The process and product solutions meet the industry partners’ specific needs in a competitive market and address the growing realization that many of the hardest and costliest problems in software development are social as well as technological. The solutions will include blueprints for novel organizational transitions and will be built on a unique combination of social and technological issues identified by cutting-edge research. The innovations will emerge at three levels:

• Company level: TeamIT is the first national project that will enable the ICT companies’ transition from traditional command and control management to collaborative leadership. TeamIT is also novel in that it explicitly addresses customer expectations in parallel to addressing industry concerns.
• National level: The process and product innovations achieved at the company level will be generalized for use in the Norwegian ICT industry. This will increase the applicability of the innovations to a national level. The tailored knowledge will be packaged into training courses for the Norwegian ICT industry.
• International level: The toolbox is cutting edge in that it systematizes and formalizes highly relevant industry-defined socio-technical solutions. The insights gained into the socio-technological mechanisms underlying teamwork and team interactions will be fundamentally new in the software engineering context. The unique challenges of software development demand that theories be adapted, restructured or refined toward the particular issues that arise. TeamIT’s scientific efforts will contribute substantially to building new knowledge both within software engineering and related disciplines.