Are teams and people working in silos in your organization? Is communication difficult across different departments?
Cross functional teams (also called feature teams in software development) are a great way to work together more efficiently. In the Scrum Framework, the development team is cross functional. This is defined as, “Cross-functional teams have all competencies needed to accomplish the work without depending on others not part of the team. The team model in Scrum is designed to optimize flexibility, creativity, and productivity.” This is one of the most simple concepts yet hardest to implement due to organizational designs and the traditional corporate models and ways of thinking.
I have worked on teams that are cross functional and the increase in productivity and creativity is immense compared to teams that lack cross functionality. Also, the culture tends to be much better in terms of employee engagement and happiness.
Let’s say for example, one works in sales at a digital advertising agency, and you have needs that span a designer, developer, tester, operations analyst, and an account manager for a sale of one of your products. These roles are in the same physical office* and yet they do not sit in the same space and work as one team. They sit in different areas throughout the building and do not talk on a daily basis. There is delay in the work getting done, there are mistakes, and the sales rep needs to communicate the hold up to the customer. Through all of these hand offs, not only is there waste in the process, there is also a lack of customer empathy because everyone is focused on the next person in the supply chain and not producing a high quality item for the customer.
If you are facing similar challenges, try having a retrospective to get ideas in the open, make one backlog, work off the same visual board, and have a daily scrum to get better communication and build transparency. Try having all the team members sit together in the same room and see what happens on the next project. Have some data to show the increase in output and reduction in operational expenses. Some of these changes will be much harder to implement if you are not in a leadership role and depending on your company’s culture. If you are in leadership at a startup, you are in an ideal position to drive change and set a solid foundation.
Do you work on a cross functional team? What have you tried to improve cross team collaboration?
Additional Readings:
- http://www.craiglarman.com/content/feature-teams/feature-teams.htm
- https://www.workzone.com/blog/cross-functional-teams/
*these roles could be in virtual offices and there are ways to address this as well such as using one virtual location like a team Skype room, google hangout, etc.