is your entire team an "emergency response team?"

Blackberries fire up at 5am, your European customer can't restore the servers after a power outage. The event has three of your teammates sending emails flying to do various systems checks and theorizing the problem.

By 9am, everyone is in the office and buzzing on coffee, when word comes down that the president wants a meeting at 9:30 to understand what happened over the weekend. The team scrambles to assemble and meet in the conference room.

At 11, the team joins the daily telecon with a vendor on the west coast to receive status. Afterwards, the independent test lab requests a meeting to discuss findings in the product testing and at 3pm, a data base sales engineer will meet to share the data standardization adaptors that will become your future architecture.

This twelve hour day is just like every other. The team members are heroes and feel satisfied with all of the issues they resolved and the now dried sweat on their brow.

If you can't relate to this scenario, then you probably don't have dominant team members who want to be where all of the action is, or docile folks that herd with the group, or loosely defined responsibilities.

Matter of fact, you are the pinnacle of where we want to be. You have dedicated colleagues that are allocated to duties. Each person's work is respected and the redundancy of team collaboration on every issue is unnecessary.

Effectively, you have one person doing one person's job, instead of five (or more) people doing one person's job; so the team will get five times more work done. When the workplace "fires" are handled with processes, people are developing efficient personal processes for completing their tasks.

When the responsibilities are not defined, the entire team rushes to the scene of every fire (some out of curiousity, some with the intent to be the hero), each with there own opinion. Chances are good that the smoldering issue could have been managed correctly by a single person tasked with being responsible for these issues and capable enough to seek the necessary inputs and brief the problem/solution.

When teams don't operate within assigned responsibilities, there is chaos from the many opinions and communications channels and will result in many people doing a single-person job. If that one person is not capable enough to manage the issue or responsible enough to follow through with effective communications, that person should be reassigned. Don't allow that person to be "assisted" with dozens of specators.