One of our clients built a cross-functional team around an important new initiative. They had all the skills and experience necessary to solve the problem. This was pre-COVID, and everyone was in-office daily, so they even dedicated a room to the team so they could easily collaborate in real-time.
This team had some of the strongest developers from several areas across the org. On the one hand, this provided a deep well of skill and experience. On the other, it brought some baggage. Because each team member was still the go-to expert for systems they’d worked on in the past—systems that still needed ongoing support.
So, when a tricky issue came up with one of these legacy systems, guess who got called?
Cross-functional teams are at the center of most Agile methods for a reason—they’re the best structure we have for collaboration around complex problems (like new product development). These teams work because they can dynamically self-organize around the work as people learn and as things change.
But they stop working when team members are only available some of the time, especially if that availability is unpredictable.
Unfortunately, that’s where our client’s team ended up. People were constantly doing work outside the team’s backlog—important, often urgent work—which made self-organization on the new work almost impossible.
The fix? Bring all the distractions to the team. Even if only one person intended to work on it, this made the collective commitments visible to everyone and allowed the team to self-organize around the combined work.
Sometimes, they actually did help each other with legacy system issues. More often, they adjusted their new development to work around the various interruptions, dynamically planning each day to keep things moving forward. And they got a clear view into their actual capacity and committed appropriately.
If you have a cross-functional team but it seems like people are constantly getting pulled off the shared work, try bringing the work to the team rather than the people to the work. It might give you that same kind of breakthrough.
Give it a try and let us know how it goes!
Last updated