Agile SWAT Teams

Create a high performance elite project team is must have for every program or organization.

SWAT teams are the most specialized and experienced team that you can build to be used in extremely complex projects and emergency situations.

SWAT teams are the silver bullet, but beware though that there is only one bullet so better we learn how to do it.




Team Organization
Team members in a SWAT team are most of their time spread among all the projects in your organization working on their regular project tasks and waiting for the emergency signal.
Best strategy with this is to create a small slack in the workload of a SWAT member since they will need time for special trainings and to reduce the time response in case of emergency.

Selection
One of the most important aspects to consider is that we cannot hire someone to be a SWAT team member. There is no way to do that.
The process to be part of this elite team must consider a previous experience doing more than 5 projects for the organization before he/she can apply.

Training and equipment
Most of the training for a SWAT team will be focused on getting a huge amount of work done as quickly as possible and how to deal with stressful situations. Most common scenario, this team must be able to get a project back on track in 1 or 2 weeks and do it meanwhile the customer and users and complaining about the product.

Processes
These teams are allowed to created and use their own processes and procedures. Focus will be on collaboration and trust on the experience of each member rather than follow any standard.
However, this must be done carefully since the risk is that we create a guerrilla gang.


Main problem with building SWAT team is that they don't escalate as a high level strategy. We cannot create many SWATs and it actually doesn't make sense. As any other "brute force" solution, this may be very useful for small problems but it's not efficient. If you think you may need more than one SWAT team, something is going wrong at a higher level and you should probably work on the business strategy.

Finally SWAT teams are a silver bullet but we may only have one bullet...