It surprises me how many people don’t fully appreciate what cross-functional teams (CFT) are or what they aim to achieve.This ends up creating problems, increasing costs, lowering moral and hindering progress. However outside the business environment many people fundamentally know the principles of a CFT, particularly anyone who has an interest in sport. The same people are sometimes incredibly passionate team players and go over and above to help their local soccer team achieve, even if this means playing in different positions just like the generalised specialists of Agile. However in a working environment, working with others outside their department is a chore and often avoided by some. Therefore why is it difficult to solve the same problem in business environments. Before we look into more details of CFT’s lets look at an official definition of what a CFT is :
“A cross-functional team is a group of people with different functional expertise working toward a common goal. It may include people from finance, marketing, operations, and human resources departments. Typically, it includes employees from all levels of an organisation. Members may also come from outside an organisation (in particular, from suppliers, key customers, or consultants).” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-functional_team
If you were to slightly reword the definition above, you would end up with a close definition of what a soccer team might be :
“A soccer team is a group of people with different skills working toward a common goal. It may include players in attack, creativity, defence and man management. Typically, it includes players from all levels of physical and mental ability. Peripheral members may also come from outside the team (in particular, physios, trainers, fans, or sponsors).”
Although that is a pretty limited comparison, its pretty obvious to see that they are both basic examples of a team. As simple as this sounds, in business the idea of a Cross-Functional team is complex and for some people unachievable and/or undesired.
Good Team Work = Good Results
When creating a simple product no one skill is above all others. It requires team work, collaboration and good communication. If you look at any product that inspires you, I am pretty confident it impresses you because the people behind the product worked well together. You only have to look at an iPhone to see that the designers, developers, engineers, marketing, sales and other areas of the business worked together to create a single product.
Creating cross-functional teams increase the potency of a product in the market place. Staying with the soccer analogy you can see the power of teams in almost every competition. If anyone remembers Greece won the UEFA Euro 2004, not by having the most expensive players, or the worlds best striker, but by having the mentality of a team and a desire to win as a team :
“The Greeks, dismissed as rank outsiders before the tournament with bookmakers giving odds of between 80–1 to 150–1 for them to win, defeated some of the favourites in the competition including defending champions France and hosts Portugal, who Greece beat in both the opening game of the tournament and the second in the final.” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greece_national_football_team
Functional Units vs Cross-Functional Teams
One of the main arguments and a valid one which prevent cross-functional teams existing is the benefit of functional units. A functional unit is a group of people grouped by a similar function for example developers with developers, designers with designers etc. The benefits of which mean that as a professional unit, strengths and processes can develop well and they can communicate with strength and confidence on how to develop further. I have no doubt that grouping people by skill will have it’s advantages. The problem is that one skill doesn’t make a product.
The sweet spot of team structure is to have the teams arranged by a purpose (product), but to have the communication of functional units.To solve this problem you need to ensure communication is managed well and is very strong. That means that efforts have to be made in order for this to work. Again referring to the soccer analogy this happens quite nicely. Although you have goalkeepers and strikers in the same team, they don’t undertake exactly the same training all the time and come together at set times with purpose. Therefore strikers will train with strikers and develop the skills needed to be a striker, but play with all the other positions for the match.
In business it’s not easy to split people up like the training example above. People have computers, desks, commutes etc. Therefore how can this be achieved ? Well one thing we have tried in work with some success is to have scheduled “Round Table” meetings. These are set times where all developers, testers or designers from different projects meet and discuss their problems, achievements or proposals. This seems to have had a positive affect and are time boxed so they don’t interfere with production metrics. There are many other methods which could help achieve the above such as weekly, fortnightly meetings (limited time); where each team can tell other teams what it developed and what it plans to develop in and how (like a large scrum meeting), good documentation, set training etc. The point is communication processes and time need to be recognised and set up just as you would schedule training in a soccer team. Unless an effort is made to account for the problems with cross-functional structures, the negatives will be problematic and a successful team will not materialise.
Fielding A Cross-Functional Team
If I was a soccer coach and was dealt with the task of fielding a team for the next match how do you think the following tactic would prevail for 90 minutes :
Isolated Functional Units
Looking at the “Attacking Tactic”,I’m pretty confident although my team might score some goals, but the opposition would score more. Looking at the “Defensive Tactic”, I’m pretty confident that I can limit the amount of goals conceded, but my team probably won’t score many in the process. With both examples, I am also pretty confident the players, coach, directors and the fans would be a little concerned with my approach and probably question my capability as the teams manager. It’s pretty obvious the team in both examples is off balance and doesn’t contain structure, limiting the chances of success. However obvious in both these examples, businesses often adopt these structures. They have teams which consist of isolated skills and capabilities and then shut them off to the other skill sets, forcing them to work in isolation physically and discourage communication.
If I was however to field a team for match day which combined all the skill sets which had a balance between defence and attack, with everyone working with a common structure and goal, I would increase the teams chances of success. To put this in perspective, match day would be developing a product in the business sense. The following very simple example demonstrates a teams structure from a business point of view :
CFT Soccer Zones
Hopefully the example above clearly demonstrates why and where different skills are needed. (I know it’s very simplified).
If its that simple, why doesn’t everybody do it ?
The analogy in this post over-simplifies a sometimes very complex business structure. For instance football team is 11 players, where as a business can be thousands. That being said, the basic strategy is relative.
There are countless reasons why this doesn’t get implemented in many companies, some more valid than others. However in my opinion some of the most common reasons why this is difficult to implement include communication, responsibility, ignorance, confidence and trust. Let me explain :
Communication
Businesses are often structured by departments, not by products. Naturally the environment is restrictive which will reduce communication and if your are co-located or international you need to allocate time and buy tools to invest in communication strategies. Being structured this way also hiders incentive. Why should Sales communicate with QA for instance? They don’t need to, “we work over here, they work over there and we do different things”. Working in isolation reduces the visibility of the big picture which is that everyone is on the same team. Instead there is more loyalty and effort shown to the each of their own departments. Waterfall project models emphasise this in their structure, when phase 1 is finished move it to another department for phase 2 and so on. This approach is fine, but often as a project moves through the sections, the vision can be lost. In a lot of cases as the project moves on through the departments, the motivation, incentive and understanding can diminish as well, causing the business to be less responsive.
Responsibility
With skills/departments not communicating well with each other, responsibility and ownership sits comfortably within the departments. If engineering make a mistake, it’s not the responsibility of marketing right? When you group people by profession and isolate the skill sets coupled with poor communication of course, a blame culture is encouraged which furthers the separation between functional units. Unless there is a common responsibility between the functional units to communicate, they will drift further apart hindering the benefits of working as a team and therefore affect the product. Organisations who don’t encourage functional units to take responsibility help further the divide at their peril. However most organisations don’t identify, encourage or monitor this responsibility as such. Yes you do have project managers who work with many departments, however project managers can work with functional units in isolation which is no benefit in getting functional units working towards the big picture. In a soccer team, you have a captain, coach and manager all making sure the team is communicating, in business you don’t always have these people.
Ignorance
If your skills and interest are limited to your department, domain or comfort zone and you are doing what is asked, why bother helping or bother spending time working with others not related to your craft? Do people from IT really need to care what Marketing do or vice versa? Of course the answer is yes to the previous question. Ignorance is more than often a choice by an individual. It’s very easy to do other people’s jobs everyone will have you think. Breaking down the barrier of ignorance can have huge benefits not just for others, but also for yourself. If one understands how others work they might structure their work differently which could increase overall performance and efficiency. Taking the IT/Marketing differences as an example, for IT to receive a change request through from marketing to a preview environment it might benefit marketing to know that each chance to a static page of content takes 3 hours of testing and 2 hours of deployment for instance. Knowing this might ensure marketing provide copy in a better state before passing it to IT, which in affect could change 10+ hours into 5 hours making the company more efficient by saving time and money. I have no doubt that Ignorance like this is costing companies millions of pounds per day!
Confidence And Trust
Yes believe it or not this can play a big part in poor communication in business. Functional Units often have leaders. Some leaders like to lead and like to be seen leading. Where functional units isolate persons and teams away from the big picture which is the cross-functional team working towards the same goal, leaders with inflated ego’s will not want to communicate. If you think you are doing a great job you might not want to give other leaders from other departments any insight to how you work as it will expose your processes which may involve weaknesses as well as strengths. If a player a soccer pitch holds onto the ball all the time and doesn’t pass, you pull them onto the bench quickly even if they are very good individually. In business who does this and is it as easy to spot?
So Now What ?
Well this post explains a simple analogy of cross-functional team structures. Obviously businesses are complex, but the same approach can be applied. For cross-functional team structures to work, decisions need to come from the top and effort need to be made to encourage the structures/tactics to have a chance to work. Analysing operations and refining processes will go a long way on setting up cross-functional teams, but just like soccer teams, they need management, structure and direction. Unless the vision is shared, the functional units have motivation,ability to communicate and people see themselves as team members and not the team, it will be difficult if not impossible to implement. Creating cross-functional team structures is a culture change as much as it is a structural change. Such changes take time, effort and planning which deter most who don’t wish to undertake long term thinking. However implemented well just like Greece winning the European Championships, you can generate more output with less input and increase your chances of success. Not all companies can be structured like this, but I’m sure the one’s who do will not look back in most cases.
If you have any feedback on this post or your company structures and experiences, please send me your response.
