Success Multidisciplinary Teams

Digital transformation is accelerating at an astonishing rate. Businesses are changing how they organize and operate. Companies can benefit from adopting digitally native concepts to remain relevant. They must embrace new ways of working to stay consistent with digital advancement. Time and efficiency are vital to creating new digital products and services within specific time frames.

Currently, digital transformation is being implemented at a rapid speed. These tech solutions are solving an ever-expanding spectrum of challenges and activities. All businesses should ensure their products and services are ahead of the competition and fulfill customer needs. To achieve this, many companies opt for multidisciplinary (fusion teams).

Many conventional organizations are shifting towards having multidisciplinary teams with various capabilities. Multidisciplinary, collaborative teams aren't a new concept. They were introduced previously in the current workplace. IT professionals have regularly worked alongside multiple departments to create digital solutions. These collaborations have become increasingly common and will continue to be a necessity in the future.

Digital capabilities in?leading?enterprises today are designed,?delivered, enhanced, and managed by multidisciplinary teams increasingly co-led or led by business leaders. This is irrespective of the extent to which?IT staff?are members of a given team.

Multidisciplinary teams become?the?predominant?unit of work for digital delivery in what Gartner calls the “value-optimizing information and technology (I&T) operating model,” essential to achieving?enterprisewide?competitive advantage and top-line growth?through digital capabilities. Gartner calls this kind of team a fusion team.

Democratized Digital Delivery: Opportunities and Challenges

However, much?can go wrong when digital delivery becomes distributed across teams, regardless of their reporting line. Organizations that do not orchestrate the democratization of digital delivery may end up with misaligned or duplicative?initiatives?and capabilities; inconsistent customer experiences; inefficiencies; and compliance, privacy, or security issues.

Avoiding?these risks requires an orchestrated, intentional approach to democratizing digital delivery by design based on clear, actionable, and commonly accepted governance principles. These principles should equip and empower?teams?to work in agile ways and eliminate unnecessary layers of bureaucracy.?They should also direct corporate functions to embrace agile methods to support teams' work. And they should instill in teams?an enterprise perspective — the accountability for managing risks and interdependencies, avoiding siloed thinking, and adopting architecturally sound and?secure ways of working.

Gartner used an empirical, quantitative analysis of more than 1,200 multidisciplinary team leaders to understand ways of working in the best teams. They distilled actionable, adaptive governance principles that must inform team governance styles.?They identified the top-performing teams (10% of their sample) as the teams that scored highest on outcome attainment while avoiding downsides (such as cybersecurity incidents and data breaches).

First and foremost, Gartner found that the conventional wisdom that multidisciplinary teams should operate autonomously and unencumbered by others to accelerate outcome attainment runs counter to the fact that the work of multidisciplinary teams is highly interconnected.?Their work is interconnected with the work of other multidisciplinary teams, with the work of core IT teams that build foundational IT capabilities used by these teams, and with the work of decision-makers in the corporate center.

Hence, the most successful multidisciplinary teams are particularly?adept?at managing interdependencies across decisions and work. Interestingly, Gartner also found that?top-performing?teams work with a wide range of IT stakeholders and other corporate functions, making it easier for them to do so.

Adaptive Governance Principles

Enterprises can?rely on five sets of governance mechanisms to implement a governance approach that fits the operational reality of their multidisciplinary teams:

★ Rule-based mechanisms (such as policies, standards, controls and mandates)

★ Role-based mechanisms (that is, roles that promote good decision making, such as product managers or risk managers)

★ Structural mechanisms (such as boards and committees)

★ Process-based mechanisms (like reviews or other risk management processes)

★ Culture-based mechanisms (beliefs, behaviors and ways of working)

IT leaders and their peers should shift the enterprise from a “command and control” to an “align, integrate and orchestrate” approach to mitigate the risks of democratized delivery while retaining its benefits.?They should?then?assess whether?the governance levers and mechanisms they rely upon line up with?the operational reality of top-performing multidisciplinary teams and?the enterprise’s need to?establish?a common?vision and sound practices for its teams.?Put differently, leaders should assess the strategic and tactical fit between the governance mechanisms they put in place for teams and our five adaptive governance principles that derive from the ways in which top-performing teams distinguish themselves.

?Organize for Interdependence,?Not?Autonomy

Ensure that structures, hierarchies and roles help fusion teams manage interdependencies within and across fusion teams and the rest of the enterprise.

Any governance style for fusion teams has to acknowledge the reality in which fusion teams work, and foster teaming structures, processes and roles to manage interdependencies effectively and efficiently.?First and foremost, a shared purpose and vision lay at the core of this effort to ensure that everyone in the value delivery chain (within and beyond a fusion team) has?clear lines of sight between their work, team outcomes and enterprise priorities.

To scale fusion team?adoption and?commit to continuous delivery, many leading enterprises adopt?product management techniques?and structure their fusion teams around specific business capabilities, value streams, strategic outcomes, or employee or customer experiences. They also?group?interrelated teams into “product lines” (also known as “product groups”) that work toward common business outcomes or customer experiences.?As the number of teams grows, further coordination is accomplished by grouping?product lines into product categories?(aka “customer journeys,” “experiences” or “platforms”) that reflect higher-level business capabilities, customer experiences or segments.

At each layer of this model, effective governance requires roles with deep technical, architecture or security expertise to help teams manage interdependencies with other teams and other parts of the enterprise. From top to bottom of this model, product leadership roles drive business strategy alignment and coordinate resources, roadmaps and releases to foster good decision making.

Senior leadership structures (and governance committees) above this model?typically remain, but they play an orchestration role, providing strategic guidance to these networks of?teams, communicating expectations and?helping fusion teams manage interdependencies.?The figure below shows the roles involved and the decisions made at the annual, quarterly and biweekly planning process for what TD (a Canadian financial services firm) calls their “customer journeys” and “platforms,” and the product groups and teams that make up these higher-level groupings.

TD’s model shows that different governance styles can run concurrently. There is an outcome-based style at the top of its product management model, where funding is fixed for each journey and platform. This leads down to an agility-based style at the lower levels of this model, where product lines and product managers have greater autonomy in determining which work gets done and how and when it gets done.

Redirect?the Corporate?Center?to Agility, Not Just Control

Culture is another lever for defining a fit-for-purpose governance approach. Multidisciplinary teams' leaders think decision-makers in areas such as HR, finance, procurement, legal, compliance, and others are open to new ways of working. Multidisciplinary teams are 12 times more likely to be top performers when the decision makers and teams in the corporate center they work with adopt more agile mindsets and ways of working.

IT leaders who try to help business leaders understand these behaviors and the ways of working required to succeed in digital business say that while business leaders may indeed commit to agile ways of working, in reality, they often stick to or return to their legacy behaviors.?

Redirecting?the?corporate?center to agility requires dedicated structures to help senior leaders participate in co-creating new ways of working in order to drive adoption and make these new ways of working stick.?One way of doing this is to dedicate roles to working with these senior leaders and reimagine “how work gets done.” We see an increasing number of organizations establish transformation management offices (TMOs) that help senior leaders redesign roles?and decision rights (such as product management and agile roles), teaming structures (such as flexible teaming models), processes (for example, integrated risk assessments) as well as objectives and key results (OKRs) and metrics. The leaders of these TMOs typically combine a background in business, technology delivery and agile methodologies.

?Manage Risk at the Edges

It should come as no surprise that the top performing multidisciplinary teams (the teams that score highest on outcome attainment while avoiding incidents and other downsides) can seamlessly access the risk management expertise they need.

The low prevalence of these practices indicates that few organizations have indeed?rethought?how their risk management experts engage with teams. Nevertheless, each one of them has a significant impact on the likelihood of a team to be among the top performers.?The third adaptive governance principle then is to ensure that risk management experts meet teams “where they are,” to provide in-the-moment, tailored support (that is, “manage risk at the edges”) and coordinate across multiple risk management functions.?One way of doing this is to embed these experts within groupings of teams, and share both business and risk outcomes with the fusion teams.

One of the governance mechanisms TD applied to “manage risk at the?edges,” was to redefine accountabilities for product team leaders and their RMP resources to share?business and risk outcomes.

Co-Create, Don’t Dictate, Standards

Who decides on standards and processes and how is another governance lever IT leaders can invoke to guide and accelerate the work of teams. Top-performing teams not only distinguish themselves by the ease with which they can access risk management expertise, they also provide?feedback on and?(when needed) are able to shape standards that pertain to their work.?This collaborative approach toward standard design requires openness among risk management experts and engages teams in a virtuous cycle of learning. Collaboration on standard design and revisions helps them understand and better articulate trade-offs, which, in turn, helps teams make better risk-related decisions themselves.

Break, Don’t Create, Talent Siloes

A critical driver of multidisciplinary team performance is its access to versatile and specialized technology talent, leading to the final principle IT leaders and their peers need to take into account as they define an agility-based governance approach: the need for dynamic and integrated talent management structures that provide a professional home for all technologists, irrespective of their reporting line.

One of the most critical resource gaps for teams is the availability of digital talent. This challenge can be compounded by?different business units competing with each other for talent, which can result in scarce digital talent allocated to areas that do not necessarily have the greatest strategic impact.?These areas also don’t necessarily coordinate or aren’t aware of each other’s initiatives, further leading to inconsistent ways of working across fusion teams and missed opportunities to share and learn best practices.

IT leaders have a unique opportunity to work with their heads of HR to redesign talent management models for technology talent within IT and beyond.?These structures should?foster role mobility?(so employees can move between roles and teams), economies of intellect (so best practices can be shared within and across teams) and the?efficient allocation of scarce technology talent?(so individual teams do not have to hire specialized technology talent themselves).?

In practice, organizations increasingly set up communities of practice to curate and share information, and drive consistent ways of working and adopting common tools and platforms. Also known as “communities of interest” or even “guilds,” these structures establish a shared purpose among employees who share an interest in a technical or a business domain and voluntarily join together to learn from each other.

IT leaders have a leading role to play in ensuring efficient hiring practices and that teams can access the right technology talent. One way of doing this is to centrally incubate and manage specialized technology talent. Business leaders at Repsol (a Spanish energy and petrochemical company), for instance, did not have the resources to pursue business innovations using artificial intelligence, blockchain, software robotics and so on.?In response, its former CIO/chief digital officer created what they called “digital hubs,” which are central groups of experts (centers of excellence or COEs) in software robotics, agile, cybersecurity, hardware robotics, user interface/experience, blockchain and omnichannel.

The digital hub or CoE model enabled Repsol to democratize access to technology skills. Depending on the requirements of its teams, Repsol IT allocated resources from the digital hubs to the teams. These technical experts also coached and mentored fusion team members on key digital competencies and were tasked to ensure the sharing of best practices among fusion teams and business units.

Human capital and culture are key drivers of value (within and beyond teams). So IT leaders have a leading role to play in helping the enterprise revisit the governance of its technology talent, and design structures and roles that foster the efficient allocation of technology talent, while ensuring role mobility and consistent ways of working among technologists?enterprisewide.

Conclusion

In summary, today’s environment is pressing organizations to move the delivery and management of digital capabilities closest to where value is created: in distributed multidisciplinar teams, closest to the customer or citizen, the channel, or business operations. IT leaders should embrace this change and seize the opportunity to help the enterprise revisit technology governance at an enterprise level. The democratization of digital delivery requires enterprise operating model changes and fit-for-purpose governance styles that mitigate the risks of democratized delivery while retaining its benefits.?Strengthening governance to orchestrate and accelerate the work of teams will be a journey. A starting point for many enterprises will be to adopt a set of adaptive governance principles that?establish a fit between the day-to-day governance of fusion teams and the operational realities of the best performing fusion teams.

From Garnter's article "Adaptive Governance Principles: How to Orchestrate and Boost the Success of Fusion Teams" and Startup Talky's article "What Are Fusion Teams and Do You Need Them in Your Startup?"