IMO there are four basic clusters of skills needed on effective teams. See below and for more my website at Level Three Leadership The task / process dichotomy is from Blake and Mouton. The creativity/pragmatic axis is mine. Do you have people that can articulate and represent all four quadrants? If not, beware.
As for technical representation, think about sequential vs concurrent engineering. The US government reacting to cost and schedule overruns with TADS and LANTIRN and other programs (Comanche) began to require concurrent engineering in which traditional end of process functions like production, maintenance and customer usability were brought forward into planning and development. (We can’t make what you designed. We can’t maintain what you built. We can’t operate what you gave us.) To avoid the cost of late stage engineering change requests (ECRs) which were very expensive in both time and money. The problem is that concurrent engineering increases the front end costs. The calculus shows that the bet is that up-front costs would be offset by late-stage change based costs. See chart below. IPDT = Integrated Product Development Teams. When defense companies used IPDT’s there was lots of resistance in large part because the benefits are only apparent at the end of a program, while the upfront costs (green line) are much, several times, higher than the traditional sequential cost structure (red line). Sequential processes in one client I had included 23 hand-offs from one department to the next. (!)
So, who should be there? Many team members IME have wondered why they were there. THAT leads us to the predictable phases of team development. See below. Beware of jumping to phase 3 (many impatient team leaders do) and ignoring clarifying the issues in the first two phases lest the unresolved/assumed issues come back to bite you in the tush.
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