How to Build Cross-Company Collaboration: A Delivery TCO Use Case

Introduction

This article describes my experience in building cross-company teamwork within a rapidly growing company to meet a defined business goal. It highlights the strategic approach taken to align teams and leadership towards a common goal, ensuring that everyone optimizes for the same objectives and has a daily mechanism and processes to support its execution and continuous improvement.?

The effort aims to create a harmonious collaborative culture where the "music" of collaboration and shared purpose drowns out the "words" of daily challenges. Some of the key challenges and tasks included:

• Breaking down large challenges into smaller ones, measuring results, and cultivating an iterative approach to map the key initiatives to achieve our goals?
• Forming a core team with the autonomy to make strategic decisions and set a high bar for execution while learning and measuring together with the program drivers?
• Establishing strategic alignment by ensuring focus and syncing of all the teams’ work plans

Background

In any growing company, one of the big challenges is encouraging collaboration and alignment between teams to ensure that everyone is optimizing for the same thing. Over the past two years, a model of joint work at the senior leadership level has been built at Augury, and in planning for 2024, I had the opportunity to lead the construction of one of these teams.?

The challenge was threefold:

1. Define the business strategy of one of the strategic company domains
2. Build the operating system to support it
3. Plan for 2024 against all the different teams in the company?

In many ways, we are just at the beginning of the path to bring about the intended impact, but sometimes "working in a good company is a good goal in itself" (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz), and one can learn from the process.

When I started this new adventure I had three guiding principles that are part of Augury's culture to support the transformation we were heading toward:

• The customer is always at the center?
• Follow a “Build-Enable-Measure-Learn” model?
• Define goals that are outcomes-oriented and not output-oriented (OKRs)

Defining the Goal and Setting a Strategy?

In the company’s annual planning, management identifies challenges that the company wants to solve for our customers and our business. One of them, for which I was responsible, was to ensure that we are building the best value delivery system for our customers, which provides an answer at a high and global scale. This challenge required most of the organization's departments to be partners.?

This domain, as large as it may be, needed to be broken down into subdomains because I learned that breaking a big problem into smaller problems helps us focus. We defined three pillars: 1) the quality of our installation, 2) the quality of our service experience, and 2) our ability to support global and different work environments.

The first stage for each subdomain was learning. We approached the annual planning with a lot of organizational knowledge and a lot of data that we had collected over the previous year. For each area, we mapped the current status, learned from our customers what works great (not forgetting the good) and what doesn't, and learned from the data, which is a challenge in itself and was partly built to allow us to make informed decisions.

From the learning, we defined the key results for each area. What metric do we want to improve and by how much? Although we wanted to work with precise data, we understood that we were aiming for a trend of improvement even if the numbers were not yet fully clear to allow us to map the opportunities and prioritize those who put the customer at the center.

As much as we wanted to make the process collaborative, we knew that to do quality and fast work, we needed to work in a ‘safe space.’ Therefore we brought together a small group of leaders: a Group Product Manager who leads this area, a VP of Services, and a VP of Operations.

One of the bigger challenges was not knowing what to include in the strategy, but how to push back any daily challenges that were not part of the initiatives that would contribute to the improvement we wanted and how to balance the more urgent issues. This process was iterative, and after we reached a point where we felt more confident, we took it to the wider teams to refine it. At the end of this roughly six-week process, we had metrics for improvement and two to three initiatives for each subdomain which we felt were the most accurate for improving the value we provide our customers.

Operating System

Initially, we were like a commando unit. We needed to create a small group where we could argue and discuss high-level and tactical issues, where each one brings their world of content and knowledge and builds something that would pave the way. But it was clear that we needed to establish an operating system that would (a) take the strategy and create a practical plan from it,? (b) allow the collaborative work to operate maximally, and (c) allow the next planning processes to be much more efficient and of higher quality.

It was clear that we were establishing a model of cross-functional collaboration while facilitating the lead of different cross-company programs.?

But how to start? First, as Collins said (Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap ... and Others Don't By James Charles Collins), we decided who should go on the bus.

• The Drivers

We've aligned each program with a dedicated lead and a program manager to create a cohesive team focused on a unified mission. This approach moved us away from siloed efforts, fostering a collective resource and capability sharing that would support our objectives and key results (OKRs). Biweekly meetings reinforced this synergy. As we built a comprehensive metric tree, we were ensuring all initiative metrics fed into our key results, creating a unified data set that underpins Augury’s delivery.

The programs were managed autonomously, with support provided in establishing a standard checklist for new product launches, while allowing flexibility for program-specific management adaptations. Monthly status updates helped us stay on track with our goals. However, our emphasis remained on achieving impactful metrics over mere output, stressing the importance of outcomes to drive improvement.

• The Core Team

In parallel, we created the core team management layer that would function almost autonomously in decision-making. These are the leaders of departments who must be partners in strategic decisions and processes and whose teams are the implementers of these plans and decisions. We aligned expectations for the group and established that they are a working forum, not a reporting forum. They would be required to engage in learning, building, enabling, and measuring the initiatives and, more importantly, to pass down the mindset and knowledge to their teams.

We built this around weekly meetings that defined four work areas: In Learning & Insights, we collectively analyzed data to glean insights and verify that our actions aligned with our goals. In Programs Tracking, we held each other accountable for the progress of our programs. We secured time to make Strategic Discussions and Decisions based on our learnings or program challenges. Lastly, Quality was at the forefront of our agenda; we dedicated ourselves to achieving customer satisfaction, not just meeting targets.?

• The Reporting Structure

As we do for all programs, we created reporting mechanisms for this endeavor. We implemented a centralized Monday board to track our programs, workstreams, responsible parties, and their current status, complemented by a comprehensive monthly report.

However, the operating system emphasized content creation over documentation and reporting. To continue Collins' metaphor, we want the bus to be full of people who talk to each other and ensure that everyone knows where we're going.

Work Plans for 2024

Given that each member of the initiative belonged to a different team in the organization, each member would need to support not only our domain but also additional business focuses. So, with the design of the strategy and the construction of the operating system, of course, there came the need to ensure that we were delivering what was necessary.

Here the drivers and the core team had to carry the weight. We defined the problems, improvements, initiatives, and how each team would build supporting work plans. With the help of the BizOps team, we mapped out dependencies and ensured that all teams recognized our needs and knew how to incorporate them into their work plans.?

Each team planned their work and was required to raise flags where reality did not meet the requirements of the strategy.

The drivers moved between the teams and set deadlines to ensure there was a roadmap for the programs that were synchronized with the team’s work plans.

This revealed the challenges of working with teams at different maturity levels: Teams that have worked together for a long time and have a planning mechanism that can provide solutions within two weeks, versus teams that are still forming or do not yet have an internal team planning process and need more help.?

Conclusion?

The success of the path I've detailed owes much to Augury's cultural foundations, which prioritizes the customer at its core, champions a cycle of Build-Enable-Measure-Learn for ongoing enhancement, and adheres to an outcome-focused methodology (OKRs) that empowers teams to deliver impactful results.

DID WE REALLY STRENGTHEN THE CROSS-COMPANY COLLABORATION?

I always say (perhaps because of my 16 years in the HR world) that we should always tune into the underlying melody.??

The challenges in the organization and our area of work are not lacking. Every day there are escalations, and setbacks, and the positive trend is not necessarily visible to the naked eye – we are solving tough challenges! But there is a melody that is beginning to sound more harmonious. Here are a few tips to follow for staying in tune:

• Focus on what matters–a shared purpose.?
• Get the relevant key stakeholders on the bus and get their commitment to shared goals. We are all bound for the same destination with clear cadences.?
• Understand that it’s about more than creating a process – it’s about communication.?

Yet, while we are aiming for cross-company collaboration to be similar to a symphony, we must remember to always leave room for jazz and improvisation, and the ability to square the circle so that we can move faster to deliver value to the customer.