Cross Functional Team Quotes

Color blindness has become a powerful weapon against progress for people of color, but as a denial mindset, it doesn’t do white people any favors, either. A person who avoids the realities of racism doesn’t build the crucial muscles for navigating cross-cultural tensions or recovering with grace from missteps. That person is less likely to listen deeply to unexpected ideas expressed by people from other cultures or to do the research on her own to learn about her blind spots. When that person then faces the inevitable uncomfortable racial reality—an offended co-worker, a presentation about racial disparity at a PTA meeting, her inadvertent use of a stereotype—she’s caught flat-footed. Denial leaves people ill-prepared to function or thrive in a diverse society. It makes people less effective at collaborating with colleagues, coaching kids’ sports teams, advocating for their neighborhoods, even chatting with acquaintances at social events.

Ian also had issues with Elizabeth’s management, especially the way she siloed the groups off from one another and discouraged them from communicating. The reason she and Sunny invoked for this way of operating was that Theranos was “in stealth mode,” but it made no sense to Ian. At the other diagnostics companies where he had worked, there had always been cross-functional teams with representatives from the chemistry, engineering, manufacturing, quality control, and regulatory departments working toward a common objective. That was how you got everyone on the same page, solved problems, and met deadlines.

Encourage a healthy proportion of bottom-up OKRs—roughly half. Smash departmental silos by connecting teams with horizontally shared OKRs. Cross-functional operations enable quick and coordinated decisions, the basis for seizing a competitive advantage. Make all lateral, cross-functional dependencies explicit.

We found it helpful to think of such cross-functional projects as a kind of tax, a payment one team had to make in support of the overall forward progress of the company. We tried to minimize such intrusions but could not avoid them altogether. Some teams, through no fault of their own, found themselves in a higher tax bracket than others. The Order Pipeline and Payments teams, for example, had to be involved in almost every new initiative, even though it wasn’t in their original charters.

focusing on a task can make people effectively blind, even to stimuli that normally attract attention. The most dramatic demonstration was offered by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons in their book The Invisible Gorilla. They constructed a short film of two teams passing basketballs, one team wearing white shirts, the other wearing black. The viewers of the film are instructed to count the number of passes made by the white team, ignoring the black players. This task is difficult and completely absorbing. Halfway through the video, a woman wearing a gorilla suit appears, crosses the court, thumps her chest, and moves on. The gorilla is in view for 9 seconds. Many thousands of people have seen the video, and about half of them do not notice anything unusual. It is the counting task—and especially the instruction to ignore one of the teams—that causes the blindness. No one who watches the video without that task would miss the gorilla. Seeing and orienting are automatic functions of System 1, but they depend on the allocation of some attention to the relevant stimulus. The authors note that the most remarkable observation of their study is that people find its results very surprising. Indeed, the viewers who fail to see the gorilla are initially sure

The climate for relationships within an innovation group is shaped by the climate outside it. Having a negative instead of a positive culture can cost a company real money. During Seagate Technology’s troubled period in the mid-to-late 1990s, the company, a large manufacturer of disk drives for personal computers, had seven different design centers working on innovation, yet it had the lowest R&D productivity in the industry because the centers competed rather than cooperated. Attempts to bring them together merely led people to advocate for their own groups rather than find common ground. Not only did Seagate’s engineers and managers lack positive norms for group interaction, but they had the opposite in place: People who yelled in executive meetings received “Dog’s Head” awards for the worst conduct. Lack of product and process innovation was reflected in loss of market share, disgruntled customers, and declining sales. Seagate, with its dwindling PC sales and fading customer base, was threatening to become a commodity producer in a changing technology environment. Under a new CEO and COO, Steve Luczo and Bill Watkins, who operated as partners, Seagate developed new norms for how people should treat one another, starting with the executive group. Their raised consciousness led to a systemic process for forming and running “core teams” (cross-functional innovation groups), and Seagate employees were trained in common methodologies for team building, both in conventional training programs and through participation in difficult outdoor activities in New Zealand and other remote locations. To lead core teams, Seagate promoted people who were known for strong relationship skills above others with greater technical skills. Unlike the antagonistic committees convened during the years of decline, the core teams created dramatic process and product innovations that brought the company back to market leadership. The new Seagate was able to create innovations embedded in a wide range of new electronic devices, such as iPods and cell phones.

What is common in high-performance teams is that they are cross-functional, collocated, and autonomous.

Pay special attention to “batons” that cross functions. Whenever a process crosses teams (Marketing handing

DevOps simply adds the idea that small, cross-functional teams should own the entire delivery process from concept through user feedback and production monitoring.

And while the details of how it is implemented vary somewhat from company to company, the core elements of the method are: the creation of a cross-functional team, or a set of teams that break down the traditional silos of marketing and product development and combine talents; the use of qualitative research and quantitative data analysis to gain deep insights into user behavior and preferences; and the rapid generation and testing of ideas, and the use of rigorous metrics to evaluate—and then act on—those results.

This analysis leads me to conclude that DevSecOps should not be defined as a team consisting of development, operations and security roles. In fact, I believe that DevSecOps is a term that describes a cross-functional DevOps team that integrates security practices within their own processes to deliver secure software and infrastructure. To put it another way, DevSecOps is DevOps done securely. In the words of Eliza-May Austin, ‘DevSecOps teams simply don’t exist.

Teams were involved in creating new technologies, processes, and systems. • Cross-functional teams were formed around new great ideas. • Customers were involved from the inception of each feature concept. It’s important to understand that the old approach did not lack customer feedback or customer involvement in the planning process. In the true spirit of genchi gembutsu, Intuit product managers (PMs) would do “follow-me-homes” with customers to identify problems to solve in the next release. However, the PMs were responsible for all the customer research. They would bring it back to the team and say, “This is the problem we want to solve, and here are ideas for how we could solve it.” Changing to a cross-functional way of working was not smooth sailing. Some team members were skeptical. For example, some product managers felt that it was a waste of time for engineers to spend time in front of customers. The PMs thought that their job was to figure out the customer issue and define what needed to be built. Thus, the reaction of some PMs to the change was: “What’s my job? What am I supposed to be doing?” Similarly, some on the engineering side just wanted to be told what to do; they didn’t want to talk to customers. As is typically the case in large-batch development, both groups had been willing to sacrifice the team’s ability to learn in order to work more “efficiently.

For most of us, when we encounter a problem, we simply want to solve it. This desire comes from a place of good intent. We like to help people. However, this instinct often gets us into trouble. We don’t always remember to question the framing of the problem. We tend to fall in love with our first solution. We forget to ask, “How else might we solve this problem?” These problems get compounded when working in teams. When we hear a problem, we each individually jump to a fast solution. When we disagree, we engage in fruitless opinion battles. These opinion battles encourage us to fall back on our organizational roles and claim decision authority (e.g., the product manager has the final say), instead of collaborating as a cross-functional team. When a team takes the time to visualize their options, they build a shared understanding of how they might reach their desired outcome. If they maintain this visual as they learn week over week, they maintain that shared understanding, allowing them to collaborate over time. We know this collaboration is critical to product success.

changing the definition of productivity for a team from functional excellence—excellence in marketing, sales, or product development—to validated learning will cause problems. As was indicated earlier, functional specialists are accustomed to measuring their efficiency by looking at the proportion of time they are busy doing their work. A programmer expects to be coding all day long, for example. That is why many traditional work environments frustrate these experts: the constant interruption of meetings, cross-functional handoffs, and explanations for endless numbers of bosses all act as a drag on efficiency.

You can predict with nearly 90 percent accuracy which projects will fail—months or years in advance. And now back to our premise. The predictor of success or failure was whether people could hold five specific crucial conversations. For example, could they speak up if they thought the scope and schedule were unrealistic? Or did they go silent when a cross-functional team member began sloughing off? Or even more tricky—what should they do when an executive failed to provide leadership for the effort?

Amazingly, the transformations are not primarily based on automation. Instead, the incredible improvements come from modifying policies around the system of work and the policies that control work in process, ensuring that there are effective cross-functional teams, subordinating everything to the constraint, and managing handoffs well.

There are various incremental improvements to the way software is delivered which will yield immediate benefits, such as teaching developers to write production-ready software, running CI on production-like systems, and instituting cross-functional teams.

only the senior leader could drive the operating rhythm, transparency, and cross-functional cooperation we needed. I could shape the culture and demand the ongoing conversation that shared consciousness required.

When you are scaling a sales team, the to-do list is endless. Hiring, training, coaching, pipeline reviews, forecasting, enterprise deal support, leadership development, and cross-functional communication are all part of the day-to-day.

team factors for agile project success: the dedicated team and the cross-functional team.

No major piece of work should be fully funded before we have evidence to support the business and economic model on which it is based, and this exploration must be done with small, cross-functional teams with a limited runway,

It’s more important for your team to be dedicated than to be “cross-functional.” I’d rather work with a balanced, diverse three-person team who are “all in” than fifteen people who cover every division of the company but can never find time to really do the hard work. While it’s good to get operators and scalers involved in the process, there are plenty of mechanisms to get them involved, exposed, and bought in if they can’t be dedicated (such as having them participate in prototyping or piloting).

Managers handle parallel projects all the time. They juggle with people, work tasks, and goals to ensure the success of every project process. However, managing projects, by design, is not an easy task. Since there are plenty of moving parts, it can easily become disorganized and chaotic. It is vital to use an efficient project management system to stay organized at work while designing and executing projects. Project Management Online Master's Programs From XLRI offers unique insights into project management software tools and make teams more efficient in meeting deadlines. How can project management software help you? Project management tools are equipped with core features that streamline different processes including managing available resources, responding to problems, and keeping all the stakeholders involved. Having the best project management software can make a significant influence on the operational and strategic aspects of the company. Here is a list of 5 key benefits to project professionals and organizations in using project management software: 1. Enhanced planning and scheduling Project planning and scheduling is an important component of project management. With project management systems, the previous performance of the team relevant to the present project can be accessed easily. Project managers can enroll in an online project management course to develop a consistent management plan and prioritize tasks. Critical tasks like resource allocation, identification of dependencies, and project deliverables can be completed comfortably using project management software. 2. Better collaboration Project teams sometimes have to handle cross-functional projects along with their day to day responsibilities. Communication between different team members is critical to avoid expensive delays and precludes the waste of precious resources. A key upside of project management software is that it makes effectual collaboration extremely simple. All project communication is stored in a universally accessible place. The project management online master's program offers unique insights to project managers on timeline and status updates which leads to a synergy between the team’s functions and project outcomes. 3. Effective task delegation Assigning tasks to team members in a fair way is a challenging proposition for most project managers. With a project management program, the delegation of project tasks can be easily done. In most instances, these programs send out automatic reminders when deadlines are approaching to ensure a smooth and efficient project workflow. 4. Easier File access and sharing Important documents should be safely accessed and shared among team members. Project management tools provide cloud-based storage which enables users to make changes, leave feedback and annotate easily. PM software logs any user changes to ensure project transparency within the team. 5. Easier integration of new members Project managers are responsible to get new members up to speed on the important project parameters within a short time. Project management online master's programs from XLRI Jamshedpuroffer vital learning to management professionals in maintaining a project log and in simplistically visualizing the complete project. Takeaway Choosing the perfect PM software for your organization helps you to effectively collaborate to achieve project success. Simple and intuitive PM tools are useful to enhance productivity in remote-working employees.

has a clearly defined business-oriented mission: developing and possibly operating one or more services that implement a feature or a business capability. The team is cross-functional and can develop, test, and deploy its services without having to frequently communicate or coordinate with other teams.

Most squads are cross-functional, consisting of engineers and marketers, collaborating as a single team with a shared understanding of customer value.

But the luxury concierge sector, a game of global access with just a handful of key players, takes personal services to the extreme. This niche traces its origins to circa 1929, when the concierges of all the grand hotels of Paris teamed up to create Les Clefs d’Or—the Golden Keys—a network meant to help its members cater to their well-heeled guests. Clefs d’Or now functions as a global fraternity of more than four thousand hotel concierges. To join, a person must have five years of hospitality experience, pass a “comprehensive test,” and otherwise prove, “beyond doubt, their ability to deliver highest quality of service.” Of the tens of thousands of hotel concierges in the United States, only about 660 have earned the right to wear Les Clefs’ crossed-keys emblem

create their own OKRs for their own organization. For example, the design department might have objectives related to moving to a responsive design; the engineering department might have objectives related to improving the scalability and performance of the architecture; and the quality department might have objectives relating to the test and release automation. The problem is that the individual members of each of these functional departments are the actual members of a cross‐functional product team. The product team has business‐related objectives (for example, to reduce the customer acquisition cost, to increase the number of daily active users, or to reduce the time to onboard a new customer), but each person on the team may have their own set of objectives that cascade down through their functional manager. Imagine if the engineers were told to spend their time on re‐platforming, the designers on moving to a responsive design, and QA on retooling. While each of these may be worthy activities, the chances of solving the business problems that the cross‐functional teams were created to solve are not high.

the core elements of the method are: the creation of a cross-functional team, or a set of teams that break down the traditional silos of marketing and product development and combine talents; the use of qualitative research and quantitative data analysis to gain deep insights into user behavior and preferences; and the rapid generation and testing of ideas, and the use of rigorous metrics to evaluate—and then act on—those results.

Every product begins with the people on the cross‐functional product team. How you define the roles, and the people you select to staff the team, will very likely prove to be a determining factor in its success or failure.

When you are listening to people on your team, take on the responsibility to understand—to actually listen—rather than putting the burden to communicate onto them. But when you are helping them prepare to explain their ideas to others—whether they are peers or cross-functional colleagues or executives—it’s your job to push your direct reports, and yourself, to do a better job than Keynes did. You need to push them to communicate with such precision and clarity that it’s impossible not to grasp their argument.

How can you run Analytics “as one”? If you leave Analytics to IT, you will end up with a first-class race car without a driver: All the technology would be there, but hardly anybody could apply it to real-world questions. Where Analytics is left to Business, however, you’d probably see various functional silos develop, especially in larger organizations. I have never seen a self-organized, cross-functional Analytics approach take shape successfully in such an organization. Instead, you can expect each Analytics silo to develop independently. They will have experts familiar with their business area, which allows for the right questions to be asked. On the other hand, the technical solutions will probably be second class as the functional Analytics department will mostly lack the critical mass to mimic an organization’s entire IT intelligence. Furthermore, a lot of business topics will be addressed several times in parallel, as those Analytics silos may not talk to each other. You see this frequently in organizations that are too big for one central management team. They subdivide management either into functional groups or geographical groups. Federation is generally seen as an organizational necessity. It is well known that it does not make sense to regularly gather dozens of managers around the same table: You’d quickly see a small group discussing topics that are specific to a business function or a country organization, while the rest would get bored. A federated approach in Analytics, however, comes with risks. The list of disadvantages reaches from duplicate work to inconsistent interpretation of data. You can avoid these disadvantages by designing a central Data Analytics entity as part of your Data Office at an early stage, to create a common basis across all of these areas. As you can imagine, such a design requires authority, as it would ask functional silos to give up part of their autonomy. That is why it is worthwhile creating a story around this for your organization’s Management Board. You’d describe the current setup, the behavior it fosters, and the consequences including their financial impact. Then you’d present a governance structure that would address the situation and make the organization “future-proof.” Typical aspects of such a proposal would be The role of IT as the entity with a monopoly for technology and with the obligation to consider the Analytics teams of the business functions as their customers The necessity for common data standards across all of those silos, including their responsibility within the Data Office Central coordination of data knowledge management, including training, sharing of experience, joint cross-silo expert groups, and projects Organization-wide, business-driven priorities in Data Analytics Collaboration bodies to bring all silos together on all management levels

here is an early version of principles established by a client adopting LeSS Huge in a product group: 1. The perfection goal is to have a releasable product all the time. Release stabilization periods need to be reduced and eventually eliminated. 2. Co-located, self-managing, cross-functional, Scrum teams are the basic organizational building block. Responsibility and accountability are on team level. 3. The majority of the teams are organized as customer-centric feature teams. 4. Product management steers the development through the Product Owner role. Release commitments are not forced on teams. 5. The line organization is cross-functional. The functional-specialized line organizations are gradually integrated in the cross-functional line organization. 6. Special coordination roles (such as project managers) are avoided and teams are responsible for coordination. 7. The main responsibility of management is improvement—improve team’s learning, efficiency, and quality. The content of the work always comes from the Product Owner. 8. There is no branching in development. And product variation is not to be reflected in the version control system. 9. All tests are automated with the exception of (1) exploratory test, (2) usability test, and (3) tests that require physical movement. All people must learn test automation skills. 10. Adoption is gradual and evolutionary. These principles are considered in every decision.

Ensure that existing resources are made available and accessible to everyone in the organization. Create space and opportunities for learning and improving. Establish a dedicated training budget and make sure people know about it. Also, give your staff the latitude to choose training that interests them. This training budget may include dedicated time during the day to make use of resources that already exist in the organization. Encourage staff to attend technical conferences at least once a year and summarize what they learned for the entire team. Set up internal hack days, where cross-functional teams can get together to work on a project.

Matthew is a smart, articulate leader. However, he often found himself frustrated and out ahead of his organization, struggling to bring a cross-functional team along with him and his ideas. He was also struggling to be heard. He had great ideas, but he was simply talking too much and taking up too much space in team meetings. I was working with him to prepare a critical leadership forum for his division. He was eagerly awaiting the opportunity to share his views about the strategy for advancing the business to the next level. Instead of encouraging him, I gave him a challenge. I gave him five poker chips, each worth a number of seconds of talk time. One was worth 120 seconds, the next three worth 90 seconds, and one was worth just 30. I suggested he limit his contribution in the meeting to five comments, represented by each of the chips. He could spend them whenever he wished, but he only had five. After the initial shock and bemusement (wondering how he could possibly convey all his ideas in five comments), he accepted the challenge. I watched as he carefully restrained himself, filtering his thoughts for only the most essential and looking for the right moment to insert his ideas. He played his poker chips deftly and achieved two important outcomes: 1) he created abundant space for others. Instead of it being Matthew’s strategy session, it became a forum for a diverse group to voice ideas and co-create the strategy, and 2) Matthew increased his own credibility and presence as a leader. By exercising some leadership restraint, everyone was heard more, including Matthew as the leader.

There were three differences in year three: • Teams were involved in creating new technologies, processes, and systems. • Cross-functional teams were formed around new great ideas. • Customers were involved from the inception of each feature concept.

I strongly recommend that startup teams be completely cross-functional, that is, have full-time representation from every functional department in the company that will be involved in the creation or launch of their early products. They have to be able to build and ship actual functioning products and services, not just prototypes. Handoffs and approvals slow down the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop and inhibit both learning and accountability. Startups require that they be kept to an absolute minimum.

Whenever possible, the innovation team should be cross-functional and have a clear team leader, like the Toyota shusa. It should be empowered to build, market, and deploy products or features in the sandbox without prior approval. It should be required to report on the success or failure of those efforts by using standard actionable metrics and innovation accounting.

The way out of this dilemma is to manage the four kinds of work differently, allowing strong cross-functional teams to develop around each area. When products move from phase to phase, they are handed off between teams. Employees can choose to move with the product as part of the handoff or stay behind and begin work on something new. Neither choice is necessarily right or wrong; it depends on the temperament and skills of the person in question.

Cross-pollination was a process we performed in the Teams to spread the wealth of knowledge and experience from one team to another. If you really think about it, individual competence is certainly important for any organization because it contributes to overall performance. But individual performance alone is inconsequential. Here’s why. Progress—within any team or company—is a function of relationships; the process of how individuals work together or successively toward a shared objective determines results.

Failure to involve leadership, employ cross-functional teams, and include relevant metrics, for example, often results in subpar future state designs that collect dust.

Internal refinement: A cross-functional group of internal experts comes together to refine and pressure test the hypotheses. These discussions bring together teams like marketing, sales, pricing, and product design. Initial customer validation: The team then starts validating product-market fit, perceived value, and WTP with target markets. Methods used include value trade-offs, ideal package (i.e. product configuration) creation, unaided WTP, and purchase probability (as outlined in Chapter 4). This typically occurs prior to writing any code. The gut-check: The concept must then pass an internal “smell test.” The team typically pitches the product concept to LinkedIn

Six years into my first job, when I was still a junior manager, I got into an argument with the head of business during dinner after the launch of a strategy. I was arguing that I didn’t believe one leg of the strategy would work, and I was forcefully trying to make the point. The next morning, a helpful colleague asked me why I was hell-bent on having what he called a ‘career limiting conversation’. But I think that conversation had a positive effect. Two weeks after that, I was chosen, by the same head of business, to lead a cross-functional team to work out plans to execute parts of the strategy. I don’t think that would have happened had the business head been offended.

I liked the people on my new team, and sync was technically challenging, but very soon, I was miserable in my new job. Why? Mostly because I was unprepared for the change in my daily routine. I went from writing software every day to worrying about my team. My schedule was always full of meetings. I had to navigate cross-functional relationships with other teams related to sync, and that involved much more politicking than I was expecting or was used to. I hadn’t realized how much I relied on writing code to feel productive and happy. My programming skill suddenly didn’t matter, and I didn’t have an intuitive sense for what I needed to do to be successful as a manager. I had taken the job for the wrong reason. It was my poorly judged attempt to make up for the missed management opportunity on Safari.

we must also ensure delivery teams are cross-functional, with all the skills necessary to design, develop, test, deploy, and operate the system on the same team.

As Fernando Cornago, Senior Director of Platform Engineering, and Markus Rautert, Vice President of Platform Engineering and Architecture, explained their IT department went from being seen as a cost center, with a single vendor providing most of the software (requiring frequent hand-offs) and only a few in-house engineers (doing more managing than engineering), to a product-oriented team organization. Adidas invested 80% of its engineering resources to creating in-house software delivery capabilities via cross-functional