How to Create and Manage Cross-Functional Teams
Guide on Managing Cross-Functional Team
To develop a good project, you need to consider two important factors — a project idea and a team of specialists. Speaking about the team, there is always a question: what team structure to choose? Cross-functional teams or CFT becomes more and more popular nowadays despite the fact that 75% of them didn’t reach the final goal.
What is Cross-Functional Team?
The cross-functional team stands for a group of specialists that work on different departments but collaborate with each other to reach the final goal of the project faster.
For instance, you’ve decided to make a website. To achieve this goal you need various specialists, e.g. a requirement analyst, a project manager, a quality assurance engineer, a UI/UX designer, and several web developers. These specialists build your project together constantly communicating with each other.
Advantages of Cross-Functional Team
Below we’ve listed several reasons to choose CFT.
- Less time, less money. A cross-functional team is profitable because specialists usually work faster. CFT tends to discuss all the questions and misunderstanding during the working process. As a result, they don’t spend a lot of time on meetings. So companies with cross-functional teams can decrease expenses due to time reduction.
- Innovative ideas. CFT consists of specialists with various knowledge and experience. So, they are able to share the experience with each other to improve workflow and brainstorm the best solutions.
- Dealing with complexity. If you build a complicated project, it’s better to choose a cross-functional team. As it was mentioned, CFT communicates faster. There are many issues for discussion during the development process, so solving them quickly is vital.
- The expert does the task. Due to many candidates, you can choose the specialist that follows your requirements and has the necessary skill set. As a result, such candidates do the task faster and more professional.
- Sense of responsibility. Members of the cross-functional team communicate with each other quite often, so they understand what impact they bring to the team. Feeling the responsibility, they tend to find good solutions in order not to let the team down.
Challenges of Cross-Functional Team
In order to manage your CFT properly and prevent them from failure, it’s better to consider possible challenges beforehand. There are four stages of project development with cross-functional team and the challenges can occur at any of them.
Forming
During this stage, you need to outsource members of your team or pick up in-house employees. Additionally, you should define the goals of CFT.
Challenge #1: Mismatched skills
Sometimes a cross-functional team consists of specialists that have the lightest workload. Of course, choosing this variant, you need to be prepared that there can be difficulties due to lack of expertise. The solution is quite simple. You just need to analyze the candidate’s knowledge and skills to choose the right employee. For instance, forming a web development team, you need to analyze the website feature and, after that, choose appropriate software engineers.
Challenge #2: Unclear goals
After picking up the right members of your cross-functional team, you need to set goals and priorities. Additionally, you need to explain the purpose for each team member, share detailed information about the project idea, and set a deadline of the task. Each member of the cross-functional team needs to know the fields they are responsible for.
Storming
This stage is considered as the most challenging because specialists have to brainstorm various ideas. As a result, there can occur conflicts among team members.
Challenge #1: Misunderstandings
Due to the diversity of employees’ experiences and interests, there can be misunderstandings among the team. To solve this problem, it’s better to organize a team building training. As a result, your workers will get to know each other better.
Challenge #2: Conflicts
If your cross-functional team is new, the conflicts are unavoidable. There are two types of conflicts — constructive and destructive. The first ones can lead to generating good ideas. But destructive conflicts can move to serious scandals. So, during this stage, you need to carefully monitor the team.
Of course, there are tips that you can use to prevent conflicts.
- You can organize conflict resolution training to improve employees’ communication skills.
- You should analyze each team member to find sensitive ones. Such people usually don’t consider other opinions.
Norming
Now the members of your cross-functional team are ready to work on your project development.
Challenge: No performers
This obstacle means that one member of the team can carefully do all the tasks while another may not. So, you need to consider all workers to find out whether all of them do everything they are supposed to do.
Performing
It’s the final stage of the project development, so your employees should work on completing all the tasks. Your project has to be completely finished at the end of this stage.
Challenge: Unsatisfied expectations
Of course, you have some expectation because you’ve set tasks and deadlines. However, sometimes your expectations are impossible to follow. To conquer this obstacle, you need to check the progress of your project development from time to time.
Additionally, pay attention to the employees’ motivation. It’s better to discuss the difficulties with the employees to find the best solutions.
Wrapping up this part, there are a lot of challenges that you can meet during cooperating with cross-functional teams. So, you need to consider them beforehand to achieve the best results.
Useful Hints on Managing Cross-Functional Team
In order to manage your team successfully and reach your final goals, you need to follow these seven simple tips:
- Organize team building training and offer workers rewards for team-oriented mindset.
- Don’t pay attention to every mistake. Usually, the members of your CFT knows about the mistake that they made and already feel upset. So, you can just give a piece of advice or guide employees instead of being rude and unsatisfied.
- Give your workers a chance to share their ideas and opinion.
- Focus on each worker, but not on the whole cross-functional team. You need to know how to motivate each team member.
- Consider the employee’s weaknesses and strengths. In this case, you can set reasonable expectations and deadlines.
- Don’t spend a lot of time on meetings in order not to interrupt workers from their tasks.
- Consider tools for effective cross-functional team management. As a result, you can make collaboration more comfortable and boost your employees’ productivity. There are various tools from messengers to tracking applications.
We’ve listed six popular tools for successful team management.
- Slack. This tool is a great solution for teams that need constant communication. Slack provides users with a lot of opportunities like creating channels, talking privately, and so on. Using Slack, your team members can follow all recent information about project development. Additionally, this tool can be connected to Dropbox and Google Drive, so it’s easy to share files. One more useful feature is an opportunity to set reminders. Slack can be used for free. But if you want to get more features, you should choose a paid version.
- Fleep. It’s one more messenger that make the communication process easier. Fleep offers to schedule tasks. This tool also integrates with Google Hangouts and allows pinning important messages. Fleep has two plans — free and paid.
- Trello. This tool can show all the tasks on the task board. As a result, the members of your cross-functional team can divide tasks into smaller ones. After that, they can add files or images and leave comments on each task. Trello can be used at no charge. But there is a paid plan for more functions.
- Microsoft Project. This team management tool gives an opportunity to schedule meetings, set deadlines, and so on. Mircofost Project is a paid tool, so you need to pay from $30 per month per one user.
Basecamp. This tool is easy to adjust and utilize. Basecamp has a lot of useful functions like commenting and messaging. You need to pay $29 per month but the amount of users doesn’t matter. - Scoro. This tool offers a lot of features like creating to-do lists, setting reminders, and more. Scoro assists in reporting on work progress. The software will cost you $22 per month per user.
Wrapping up this article, the cross-functional teams have their benefits and drawbacks. However, good management can lead to perfect results.
