Cross functional teams power digital transformation

Digital processes don’t care about our silos or organisational boundaries. They cut across our functions, geographies, existing business processes, budgets and approval routines.

They don’t (and shouldn’t) care about our legacy relationships, egos and career aspirations. In creating a seamless customer journey for an internal or external customer, digital processes are naturally horizontal.

So if we can’t operate effectively in this cross functional team, “matrixed” way of working, we can’t implement or operate many digital processes.

Cross functional team challenges

Cross functional teams have all the usual team challenges, plus a few additional ones

• They are matrixed, the individuals from different functions reporting to different bosses, with solid, dotted or sometimes no reporting lines. These reflect their project or team, their functional expertise (and sometimes their business units and geographies too)
• Team members are usually working on multiple teams and have to manage competing priorities and switching from one way of working to another
• In a world of multiple teams, multi reporting lines and multiple stakeholders, team members need to take much more ownership for managing their own clarity and prioritisation
• They have to navigate collaboration overload with too many meetings and often slow and frustrating decision making processes that haven’t caught up with cross functional working
• They need to balance the need for alignment with autonomy to get on and do their work

Today cross functional teams are usually in part virtual or hybrid; so collaboration, influence, and all other soft skills need to be exercised in an environment where some people are present and others may not be.

In digital transformation they also operate in a context of continuous, technology-led change.

Our matrix management and virtual and hybrid teams training have focused on these themes for many years but it’s become increasingly clear that if you can’t operate in this matrix way you cannot succeed in a digital transformation.

If you need to improve cross functional collaboration, speed up delivery and simplify your ways of working, why not get in touch?