The strength of Cross-functionality

This is a real story in faraway galaxy. At the heart of this galaxy, was a wonderful world. It was all physical. A C-level executive from plant earth landed on this wonderful world with a smartphone in her pocket and wearables on her body. Soon the indigenous inhabitants of the planet started to respect this C-level executive. She became a HiPPO (Highest Paid Person with Opinion) in no time. She was digital. A digital transformation of the world would bring enormous benefits.

She said we need to be Agile. Everyone was impressed and awed with the mere mention of word Agile. Everyone was buzzing with energy. Future is going to be orange and once we are Agile, no other planet will be more prosperous than ours.

But anything worth doing is hard. And becoming Agile is no different. An Ogre came out from the shades against the executive.

And the below conversation started ...

Ogre: I am a worshiper of the waterfall methodology. I cannot allow you to become Agile.

Executive: I am going to become Agile. I am not scared of any Ogre.

Ogre: Ha Ha Ha Ha! Have heard it so many times, on so many planets. Let's see how you are going to do it. I am confident that you will do agile but will not become agile. What are you going to do first?

Executive: I am going to set up my teams to be cross-functional.

Ogre: Hmmm. You are stronger than other opponents I have had. But are sure? Are cross-functional teams not only for engineering? I can let you go ahead with your plans if you commit only cross-functional engineering teams. Agree?

Executive: Nah. No way I am giving in. I am going to look at what all we do and based on domains, subdomains and events will design the entire planet to have cross-functional teams for all work.

Ogre is starting to feel the pressure now.

Ogre: Ok. The fight is own then. I will not let you go ahead with this. But why are you so stubborn on cross-functional teams?

Executive: If the work on this planet happens through cross-functional teams, work will flow. The most expensive work which a team does is handover to other teams. Cross-functional teams would mean, minimal handovers and thus prosperity for all. It makes the team self-sufficient and brings the intrinsic motivations of team members out.

Ogre: All things worth measuring can be measured. It seems like cross-functionality is not quantitative. You are weak. You will not be able to measure it. I have infected the whole race with the worm of creativity. Everyone in your team will design. The more committed and capable team members will be, the more they will design and be creative. This will mean a lot of change. And with the change, cross-functionality of your team will be reduced gradually to zero. I will defeat you.

The executive is shaking now. Ogre is much stronger than initially thought.

Executive: Not so easily my friend. I will measure the strength of my cross-functionality empirically. I will empower each team to continuously learn and fix the decay in cross-functionality.

Ogre: You mean you have a fitness function for this cross-functional property of the operating model? Never heard that before. Seems like you have a new weapon.

Executive: Yes I do

Orge: Explain?

Executive: I will set up a hierarchical kanban board for all work. Will Epics composed of features and features composed of user stories. Epics will be for highest servants of the planet, Features will mid-level servants and user story level for real owners of the planet. The owners will work in cross-functional teams. Whenever they need help they will shout out for help from a servant at mid-level. And if the mid-level servant has to speak with other servants and their owners, they will have to tag the user story as non-cross-functional. We will create a trending graph for counts of user stories with this tag and mid-level servants will have to work continuously to keep the trend going downhill. All servants at all levels will get paid based on how strong they keep the strength of cross-functionality of the owner's teams.

Ogre is feeling the heat now and looking for a way out of this fight.

Ogre: A continuous downhill trend my a$$! You are naive. You are ignoring the cost of wastage of resource in trying to keep teams cross-functional. You will have to share resources between teams for optimal use. Some work will not be decoupled and will require your teams to be much larger. Dunbar numbers will work against your performance as the teams will grow. Also, the change will ensure you cannot keep on going on a downhill and reach 100% cross-functionality.

Executive: Your are correct. You got me. You know I have a strong weapon with me. Can we give up the fight and work together? We can find the optimal level of cross-functionality. We can work together and come up with a fitness function for other properties we need in the teams. And together we will keep the properties in balance.

Ogre agreed and the planet prospered.

I made up the above story to make a point that we all want to make and be part of cross-functional teams. The cross-functional teams are high performing and being part of them is massively exciting. But it is not easy to have a cross-functional team setup especially outside of 100% engineering function. It is even more difficult to maintain the health of cross-functionality of the team as business entropy starts to decay the operating model. It is also very risky to go after a theoretical maximum.

We, humans, are always architecting. Some like me call it out with technical terminology from Enterprise architecture practices while others might use their own domain language. Doesn't matter what we do but at some level, we all, at some scale are architecting at our jobs. And as we all are architecting, we are poking a complex system called our team, department and finally the whole organization. And this along with outside factors is business entropy. And the rate of business entropy is increasing every day. Meaning even if we get a fully cross-functional team set up correctly in the first place, it will start to decay immediately. Thus it is important to put an empirical measure in place for cross-functionality and other properties for your organizational structure to become and be agile.

In the above story, the measure is the number of user stories tagged. A simple and clear measure if cross-functionality is decaying or not.

I am not saying Agility means cross-functional teams. It is much more and might right other articles on those. Cross-functionality as a property of a team is one property for agility. This article is how we can have a measure a.k.a a fitness function to govern this property - maybe even in an automated way. Governance has massive benefits if done for enabling.