Tiger team

A tiger team is a diversified group of experts brought together for a single project, need, or event. They are usually assigned to investigate, solve, build, or recommend possible solutions to unique situations or problems. They are almost always populated with mature experts who know what's at stake, what needs to be done, and how to work well with others. Their strengths are diversity of knowledge, a single focus or purpose, cross-functional communications, decision-making sovereignty, and organizational agility. Once their venture is completed they cease to be a team and usually go back to their previous assignments.

The metaphor of a tiger comes from the power and agility of the teams. There are no limits to their size, reasons, or purpose parameters. They may be assigned to locate new knowledge sources, create an impactful event, or form an exit plan. The scope of their work may be very large or very small. They may be a team for a few days, or for many years. They may meet regularly, frequently, intermittently, or rarely.

The concept originally came out of early NASA innovations for solving technical or systemic problems. A 1964 paper defined the term as "a team of undomesticated and uninhibited technical specialists, selected for their experience, energy, and imagination, and assigned to track down relentlessly every possible source of failure in a spacecraft subsystem."

In security work, a tiger team is a specialized group that tests an organization's ability to protect its assets by attempting to circumvent, defeat, or otherwise thwart that organization's internal and external security. In this context, the tiger team is often created to work in perpetuity, as opposed to for a singular event, since security is typically an on-going effort in an organization. For example, one implementation of an information security tiger team approach divides the team into two co-operating groups: one for vulnerability research, which primarily finds and researches the technical aspects of a vulnerability, and one for vulnerability management, which primarily manages communication and feedback between the team and the organization, as well as ensuring each discovered vulnerability is tracked throughout its life-cycle and ultimately resolved.

This article is based on material taken from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing prior to 1 November 2008 and incorporated under the "relicensing" terms of the GFDL, version 1.3 or later.

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