Skip to main content

War Rooms for IT: More Harm Than Good?

Belinda Yung-Rubke

As enterprise networks become ever more complex, IT teams face a difficult challenge when it comes to diagnosing and addressing technical and operational issues. Modern IT systems are often an amalgam of networks, servers and applications that are managed by largely independent teams with their own processes and tools. That can make responding to something straightforward — like end-user complaints about poor application performance — an involved and vexing problem that is as much about managing group dynamics as tracing packets and pings.

In recent years, the War Room model has become a popular approach to large group problem solving in IT as well as other organizational settings. Sometimes called Tiger Teams or extreme collaboration, the basic approach of the War Room is to round up a group of people who don't always work together, put them in one place and set them to finding a solution to a critical problem. The premise is that in-person interaction and a singular goal will lead to new thinking, and a quicker, more effective solution.

First utilized by software development teams, War Rooms have now become accepted practice for generalized IT teams. Unfortunately, War Rooms may not work as well as advertised, if at all.

As Toxic War Rooms — a recent research paper from Seattle Pacific University — points out, there are four common pathologies that call into question the effectiveness of the War Room approach.

1. They lead to defending and deflecting rather than problem solving

Ask most IT people and they'll tell you they have more than enough work to fill their days. In a War Room setting, they will often be reluctant to take on more responsibilities if it means delaying or neglecting the work that is already on their plates. Since War Rooms are often tense, finger pointing is fairly common. And since each person has their own tools and monitoring systems, it's hard to get everyone on the same page.

2. They make teams less productive

As mentioned above, everybody has their own work to do. When they're in a War Room that "real" work is not getting done. And as the old adage goes: "To a hammer, everything looks like a nail." That means War Room participants often approach problems from their own narrow perspectives, leading to a lack of coherence. With so many individual ideas and voices, it can actually get in the way of individual thought processes.

3. They are reactive and not proactive

War Rooms are often set up to deal with problems only after they've reached crisis stage. The extreme nature of the problems — and resulting pressure to fix them — leads to poor decision-making.

Moreover, by its very nature, the War Room assembles people from different domains operating with limited information. This adds to the likelihood of reactive decision-making in the short term and doesn't help with long-term problem solving either.

4. They promote groupthink

People working in groups can often lose themselves to the group. They start thinking alike, defer to dominant voices and lose their own individual creativity and sense of responsibility.

In a crisis, near-term solutions often crowd out potentially better longer-term alternatives. And in the interest of group harmony, people self-censor rather than challenge the dominant wisdom. That can lead to situations where groups continue to pursue an alternative even when it's becoming increasingly clear that they're headed in the wrong direction.

Click here to read Part 2 of this blog: 4 Alternatives to War Rooms

Belinda Yung-Rubke is Director of Field Marketing for Fluke Networks.

Related Links:

www.flukenetworks.com

Click here to read the full paper from Seattle Pacific University

Hot Topics

The Latest

E-commerce is set to skyrocket with a 9% rise over the next few years ... To thrive in this competitive environment, retailers must identify digital resilience as their top priority. In a world where savvy shoppers expect 24/7 access to online deals and experiences, any unexpected downtime to digital services can lead to significant financial losses, damage to brand reputation, abandoned carts with designer shoes, and additional issues ...

Efficiency is a highly-desirable objective in business ... We're seeing this scenario play out in enterprises around the world as they continue to struggle with infrastructures and remote work models with an eye toward operational efficiencies. In contrast to that goal, a recent Broadcom survey of global IT and network professionals found widespread adoption of these strategies is making the network more complex and hampering observability, leading to uptime, performance and security issues. Let's look more closely at these challenges ...

Image
Broadcom

The 2025 Catchpoint SRE Report dives into the forces transforming the SRE landscape, exploring both the challenges and opportunities ahead. Let's break down the key findings and what they mean for SRE professionals and the businesses relying on them ...

Image
Catchpoint

The pressure on IT teams has never been greater. As data environments grow increasingly complex, resource shortages are emerging as a major obstacle for IT leaders striving to meet the demands of modern infrastructure management ... According to DataStrike's newly released 2025 Data Infrastructure Survey Report, more than half (54%) of IT leaders cite resource limitations as a top challenge, highlighting a growing trend toward outsourcing as a solution ...

Image
Datastrike

Gartner revealed its top strategic predictions for 2025 and beyond. Gartner's top predictions explore how generative AI (GenAI) is affecting areas where most would assume only humans can have lasting impact ...

The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is accelerating across the telecoms industry, with 88% of fixed broadband service providers now investigating or trialing AI automation to enhance their fixed broadband services, according to new research from Incognito Software Systems and Omdia ...

 

AWS is a cloud-based computing platform known for its reliability, scalability, and flexibility. However, as helpful as its comprehensive infrastructure is, disparate elements and numerous siloed components make it difficult for admins to visualize the cloud performance in detail. It requires meticulous monitoring techniques and deep visibility to understand cloud performance and analyze operational efficiency in detail to ensure seamless cloud operations ...

Imagine a future where software, once a complex obstacle, becomes a natural extension of daily workflow — an intuitive, seamless experience that maximizes productivity and efficiency. This future is no longer a distant vision but a reality being crafted by the transformative power of Artificial Intelligence ...

Enterprise data sprawl already challenges companies' ability to protect and back up their data. Much of this information is never fully secured, leaving organizations vulnerable. Now, as GenAI platforms emerge as yet another environment where enterprise data is consumed, transformed, and created, this fragmentation is set to intensify ...

Image
Crashplan

OpenTelemetry (OTel) has revolutionized the way we approach observability by standardizing the collection of telemetry data ... Here are five myths — and truths — to help elevate your OTel integration by harnessing the untapped power of logs ...

War Rooms for IT: More Harm Than Good?

Belinda Yung-Rubke

As enterprise networks become ever more complex, IT teams face a difficult challenge when it comes to diagnosing and addressing technical and operational issues. Modern IT systems are often an amalgam of networks, servers and applications that are managed by largely independent teams with their own processes and tools. That can make responding to something straightforward — like end-user complaints about poor application performance — an involved and vexing problem that is as much about managing group dynamics as tracing packets and pings.

In recent years, the War Room model has become a popular approach to large group problem solving in IT as well as other organizational settings. Sometimes called Tiger Teams or extreme collaboration, the basic approach of the War Room is to round up a group of people who don't always work together, put them in one place and set them to finding a solution to a critical problem. The premise is that in-person interaction and a singular goal will lead to new thinking, and a quicker, more effective solution.

First utilized by software development teams, War Rooms have now become accepted practice for generalized IT teams. Unfortunately, War Rooms may not work as well as advertised, if at all.

As Toxic War Rooms — a recent research paper from Seattle Pacific University — points out, there are four common pathologies that call into question the effectiveness of the War Room approach.

1. They lead to defending and deflecting rather than problem solving

Ask most IT people and they'll tell you they have more than enough work to fill their days. In a War Room setting, they will often be reluctant to take on more responsibilities if it means delaying or neglecting the work that is already on their plates. Since War Rooms are often tense, finger pointing is fairly common. And since each person has their own tools and monitoring systems, it's hard to get everyone on the same page.

2. They make teams less productive

As mentioned above, everybody has their own work to do. When they're in a War Room that "real" work is not getting done. And as the old adage goes: "To a hammer, everything looks like a nail." That means War Room participants often approach problems from their own narrow perspectives, leading to a lack of coherence. With so many individual ideas and voices, it can actually get in the way of individual thought processes.

3. They are reactive and not proactive

War Rooms are often set up to deal with problems only after they've reached crisis stage. The extreme nature of the problems — and resulting pressure to fix them — leads to poor decision-making.

Moreover, by its very nature, the War Room assembles people from different domains operating with limited information. This adds to the likelihood of reactive decision-making in the short term and doesn't help with long-term problem solving either.

4. They promote groupthink

People working in groups can often lose themselves to the group. They start thinking alike, defer to dominant voices and lose their own individual creativity and sense of responsibility.

In a crisis, near-term solutions often crowd out potentially better longer-term alternatives. And in the interest of group harmony, people self-censor rather than challenge the dominant wisdom. That can lead to situations where groups continue to pursue an alternative even when it's becoming increasingly clear that they're headed in the wrong direction.

Click here to read Part 2 of this blog: 4 Alternatives to War Rooms

Belinda Yung-Rubke is Director of Field Marketing for Fluke Networks.

Related Links:

www.flukenetworks.com

Click here to read the full paper from Seattle Pacific University

Hot Topics

The Latest

E-commerce is set to skyrocket with a 9% rise over the next few years ... To thrive in this competitive environment, retailers must identify digital resilience as their top priority. In a world where savvy shoppers expect 24/7 access to online deals and experiences, any unexpected downtime to digital services can lead to significant financial losses, damage to brand reputation, abandoned carts with designer shoes, and additional issues ...

Efficiency is a highly-desirable objective in business ... We're seeing this scenario play out in enterprises around the world as they continue to struggle with infrastructures and remote work models with an eye toward operational efficiencies. In contrast to that goal, a recent Broadcom survey of global IT and network professionals found widespread adoption of these strategies is making the network more complex and hampering observability, leading to uptime, performance and security issues. Let's look more closely at these challenges ...

Image
Broadcom

The 2025 Catchpoint SRE Report dives into the forces transforming the SRE landscape, exploring both the challenges and opportunities ahead. Let's break down the key findings and what they mean for SRE professionals and the businesses relying on them ...

Image
Catchpoint

The pressure on IT teams has never been greater. As data environments grow increasingly complex, resource shortages are emerging as a major obstacle for IT leaders striving to meet the demands of modern infrastructure management ... According to DataStrike's newly released 2025 Data Infrastructure Survey Report, more than half (54%) of IT leaders cite resource limitations as a top challenge, highlighting a growing trend toward outsourcing as a solution ...

Image
Datastrike

Gartner revealed its top strategic predictions for 2025 and beyond. Gartner's top predictions explore how generative AI (GenAI) is affecting areas where most would assume only humans can have lasting impact ...

The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is accelerating across the telecoms industry, with 88% of fixed broadband service providers now investigating or trialing AI automation to enhance their fixed broadband services, according to new research from Incognito Software Systems and Omdia ...

 

AWS is a cloud-based computing platform known for its reliability, scalability, and flexibility. However, as helpful as its comprehensive infrastructure is, disparate elements and numerous siloed components make it difficult for admins to visualize the cloud performance in detail. It requires meticulous monitoring techniques and deep visibility to understand cloud performance and analyze operational efficiency in detail to ensure seamless cloud operations ...

Imagine a future where software, once a complex obstacle, becomes a natural extension of daily workflow — an intuitive, seamless experience that maximizes productivity and efficiency. This future is no longer a distant vision but a reality being crafted by the transformative power of Artificial Intelligence ...

Enterprise data sprawl already challenges companies' ability to protect and back up their data. Much of this information is never fully secured, leaving organizations vulnerable. Now, as GenAI platforms emerge as yet another environment where enterprise data is consumed, transformed, and created, this fragmentation is set to intensify ...

Image
Crashplan

OpenTelemetry (OTel) has revolutionized the way we approach observability by standardizing the collection of telemetry data ... Here are five myths — and truths — to help elevate your OTel integration by harnessing the untapped power of logs ...