👩🏭Cross-Functional Agile Teamwork
Agile teams collaborate across their job titles. In fact, there should be no "job titles" limiting people to responsibilities! Read more below.
Last updated
Agile teams collaborate across their job titles. In fact, there should be no "job titles" limiting people to responsibilities! Read more below.
Last updated
Waterfall teams dedicate people to specific functions. In a traditional waterfall team, each person has a dedicated duty that they do all the time.
The designer designs. The coder codes. The researcher researches. They all rely on each other to do their specific function.
When one person leaves, everyone else waits. The specified duty must be filled.
Work stops.
When the researcher is busy, the rest of the team waits for them to finish.
Work stops.
That's not efficient at all.
When they don't involve others in their work, they create what's called a "work silo". Someone who is dedicated to a role does the work alone, and only for what they were hired for.
Waterfall teams are made up of "work silos".
We need to work together to achieve shared outcomes. We need different perspectives to make decisions. We need to share knowledge and information across teams for them to succeed. Cross-functional teamwork achieves this.
"Cross-functional" Agile teams are teams that contribute across functions together.
They have diverse backgrounds and perspectives. They pitch into each other's work, and they aren't working in one single function. Perspectives are shared across all functions when performing duties. Everyone can contribute to responsibilities across functions whenever they want to.
Cross-functional team members contribute toward a "shared outcome". The entire team, and all of its functions, equally pitch in to get the outcome achieved. When designers volunteer to code, and researchers volunteer to design, and designers volunteer to research, this is celebrated. 📍
A cross-functional Agile team is assembled for the "perfect heist". They have no titles. They do not stick to one duty. They will only achieve success by working with each other collaboratively.
They all have different backgrounds. They each bring their own unique capabilities. They collaborate with each other in work across different skill sets and functions. They volunteer in the moments that work is needed to achieve the outcome.
Each teammate pitches in to collaborate on work that the other teammates are doing all the time. Diverse perspectives are heard in the work. The more diverse perspectives are heard, the stronger the outcomes. Everyone is a valuable member of the Agile Heist Team.
Each week, the duties change because the team asks who wants to own work whenever they prioritize tasks. People agree to the responsibilities they play in the moments that work needs to be prioritized. They self-organize and agree together who's going to be involved, and how.
You've got the psychological safety to take risks, and you've got service leaders around you helping you grow while doing work that you may have never done before. You and the team self-organize to agree to who will pitch into work. The team prioritizes opportunities for people to continuously improve and try things for the first time.
Here are some things you will hear on strongly performing Agile cross-functional teams:
If there's strong psychological safety:
“I’m a developer, but I want to participate in user testing this sprint with the designers and researchers.”
If there's strong service leadership:
"How do you want to be supported in the work? How do you want to get involved in other team roles?”
If there's strong self-organization:
“All teams can vote together on what tasks we’re going to take on this iteration”
If there's strong continuous improvement:
“Let’s get with the research team to discuss how this design task went and discuss how to change the way we collaborate in the future”
If there's strong iterative value delivery:
“We’re going to have a usable feature to test with users by the end of the week”.
All of this may sound confusing to you if you've never experienced it. Why not stick to your job duties? Work silos are good for expectation setting, right?
If your job title is one thing, and you are supposed to work cross-functionally, does that mean you are not doing things in your job title?
No!
Everyone makes their own decision about what they want to contribute to on the team as part of the heist team. No person tells other people what to work on. Teammates assign themselves work based on the team goals and their interests.
If teammates want to stick to a particular function, they'd still collaborate with other kinds of work. Others will rely on their perspective.
During meetings like Sprint Planning in the Scrum Method, teams get together to agree to the shared outcome with Sprint Goals. The Scrum Master helps teammates assign themselves work based on goals. They all self-commit to who's responsible, who's accountable, who's consulted, and who's informed in the work.
No one else tells them what to do, or assigns them work.
They must self-commit. If they commit to work in their own function, great! If they self-commit to work outside of their function, they should be supported!
This is when the team cross-functionally spans across different roles if they want to do so.
The important distinction is this: the team has the capabilities to span across any function while performing work, and they may need to do so in their daily cross-functional work together.
Someone might get sick. Someone might leave the team. Someone might be busy with other things.
That's ok! You have a cross-functional team! No one is siloed. The important thing is for the team to not wait. They are a psychologically safe, self-organized team, and the people who are not in those functions can also do all kinds of other work if they are in a supported environment.
Agile teams maintain a deliverable called a RACI chart (which stands for "Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed") to map out a team's desired functional activities based on the needed tasks.
The chart will change every week because the heist team contributes to different work every week. Team members maintain the details. No one dictates this. The team gets together to agree and build consensus about who does what tasks. This deliverable helps cross-functional teams set expectations across the team.
Learn more about this in the Agile Deliverables section of the Agile Handbook.