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Companies desire to improve their team organization by learning from other companies in their sector and adopting “best practice”. Researchers and consultants, who are called on to facilitate these learning processes, are confronted with the real world ambiguity and multiple meanings of “team” and “team organization”. A shared understanding of team organization is a precondition for learning and knowledge transfer between companies. This paper seeks to ask how this common understanding can be constructed.

The paper uses participatory research and a literature review. Based on a research project involving Norwegian manufacturing companies, the paper presents and discusses a participatory process, in which a graphical profiling tool was developed and applied in order to make sense of different forms of team organization.

The paper finds that companies were actively involved in deciding what the relevant dimensions of team working were. In reflection seminars, systematical comparison between companies dissolved conceptual ambiguity and supported reflection.

The paper reports experiences with the mapping tool from two companies. Both are characterized by cooperative industrial relations, and openness to researchers. More research should be done in order to investigate the general workability of the process proposed here.

The proposed process for constructing and using a mapping tool are relevant for consultants and researchers, who aim to facilitate learning in a multiple company context. In particular, it is relevant for dealing with popular, but unclear concepts such as “team” and “team working”. To be workable, the process should take care to involve relevant stakeholders and the profiling should avoid technical language.

Through a participatory approach, all participants in an organization can take part in a dialogue on team working. By introducing a common language, power distances may be reduced.

The general idea of using graphical profiling to support reflection is not original. The contribution is presenting and discussing a concrete participatory process for how graphical profiling can be made relevant and useful.

This paper seeks to identify and explore critical challenges for the process industry in information technology (IT) infrastructure integration and adaptation.

An exploratory case study was conducted at a paper mill and their main IT‐vendor. Using a qualitative approach eight semi‐structured interviews were carried out with representatives from both organizations.

The paper identifies four critical challenges in the integration and adaptation of IT‐infrastructure in the process industry: integration as an ongoing process; maintaining stability in the installed base; locking the right stuff in; and balancing user value, continuity of production and compatibility.

Given the centrality of IT infrastructure in today's process industries, the importance of dealing with these challenges must be emphasized. The four challenges identified in this study are of such a complexity that they can only lend themselves to the evolutionary strategy. Such a strategy is in concert with the sensibility towards risk found in the paper industry.

This paper contributes by building on and expanding IT‐infrastructure literature, as a result of exploring IT‐adaptation challenges in process industry organizations. The findings also provide managers with a valuable insight into recognizing and handling these challenges.