Cross-functional team

Last updated

A cross-functional team (XFN), also known as a multidisciplinary team or interdisciplinary team, [1] [2] [3] is a group of people with different functional expertise working toward a common goal. [4] It may include people from finance, marketing, operations, and human resources departments. Typically, it includes employees from all levels of an organization. Members may also come from outside an organization (in particular, from suppliers, key customers, or consultants).

Contents

Cross-functional teams often function as self-directed teams assigned to a specific task which calls for the input and expertise of numerous departments. Assigning a task to a team composed of multi-disciplinary individuals increases the level of creativity and establishes common opinion. Each member offers an alternative perspective to the problem and potential solution to the task. In business today, innovation is a leading competitive advantage and cross-functional teams promote innovation through a creative collaboration process. Members of a cross-functional team need not be well versed in multi-tasking per se, but must be prepared to help out in different aspects of building an actual product as they are collectively responsible for their cross-functional team duties as well as their normal day-to-day work tasks.

Some researchers have viewed cross-functional interactions as cooperative or competitive in nature, while others have argued that organization's functional areas are often forced to compete and cooperate simultaneously with one another (“coopetition”) and it is critical to understand how these complex relationships interplay and affect firm performance. [5]

Decision making within a team may depend on consensus, but often is led by a manager/coach/team leader. Leadership can be a significant challenge with cross-functional teams. Leaders are charged with the task of directing team members of various disciplines. They must transform different variations of input into one cohesive final output. Cross-functional teams can be likened to the board of directors of a company. A group of individuals of various backgrounds and disciplines are assembled to collaborate in an efficient manner in order to better the organization or solve a problem.

Some organizations are built around cross-functional workflows by having reporting lines to multiple managers. This type of management is called matrix management, and such organizations are often called matrix organizations.

Effects

The growth of self-directed cross-functional teams has influenced decision-making processes and organizational structures. Although management theory likes to propound that every type of organizational structure needs to make strategic, tactical, and operational decisions, new procedures have started to emerge that work best with teams. [6]

Less unidirectional

Up until recently,[ when? ] decision making flowed in one direction. Overall corporate-level objectives drove strategic business unit (SBU) objectives, and these in turn, drove functional level objectives. Today,[ when? ] organizations have flatter structures, companies diversify less, and functional departments have started to become less well-defined. The rise of self-directed teams reflects these trends. Intra-team dynamics tend to become multi-directional rather than hierarchical. Interactive processes encourage consensus within teams. Also the directives given to the team tend to become more general and less prescribed.

Greater scope of information

Cross-functional teams require a wide range of information to reach their decisions. They need to draw on information from all parts of an organization's information base. This includes information from all functional departments. System integration becomes important because it makes all information accessible through a single interface. An inherent benefit of a cross-functional team is the breadth of knowledge brought to the group by each member. Each team member is a representative of a department and therefore can leverage their familiarity with accessing and providing knowledge of that department for the team. This increases the efficiency of a cross-functional team by reducing time spent gathering information.

Greater depth of information

Cross-functional teams require information from all levels of management. The teams may have their origins in the perceived need to make primarily strategic decisions, tactical decisions, or operational decisions, but they will require all three types of information. Almost all self-directed teams will need information traditionally used in strategic, tactical, and operational decisions. For example, new product development traditionally ranks as a tactical procedure. It gets strategic direction from top management, and uses operational departments like engineering and marketing to perform its task. But a new product development team would consist of people from the operational departments and often someone from top management.

In many cases, the team would make unstructured strategic decisions—such as what markets to compete in, what new production technologies to invest in, and what return on investment to require; tactical decisions like whether to build a prototype, whether to concept-test, whether to test-market, and how much to produce; and structured operational decisions like production scheduling, inventory purchases, and media flightings. In other cases, the team would confine itself to tactical and operational decisions. In either case it would need information associated with all three levels.

Greater range of users

Cross-functional teams consist of people from different parts of an organization. Information must be made understandable to all users. Not only engineers use technical data, and not only accountants use financial data, and not only human resources personnel use HR data. Modern organizations lack middle managers to combine, sort, and prioritize the data. Technical, financial, marketing, and all other types of information must come in a form that all members of a cross-functional team can understand. This involves reducing the amount of specialized jargon, sorting information based on importance, hiding complex statistical procedures from the users, giving interpretations of results, and providing clear explanations of difficult. Data visualization systems can present complex results in an intuitive manner.

Less goal dominated

Since Peter Drucker in 1954 book The Practice of Management published his views on management by objectives, business decision making has become more goal-oriented.[ according to whom? ] Managers have come to view decision-making generally, and strategic thinking in particular, as a multi-stage process that starts with an assessment of the current situation, defining objectives, then determining how to reach these objectives. Management by objectives took this basic scheme and applied it to virtually all significant decisions.

Today[ when? ] many firms have started to opt for a less structured, more interactive approach. One way of implementing this involves using self-directed cross-functional teams. [7] Proponents hope that these teams will develop strategies that will re-define industries and create new “best practice”.[ citation needed ] They[ who? ] think that incremental improvements do not suffice.[ citation needed ]

Cross-functional teams, using unstructured techniques and searching for revolutionary competitive advantages, allegedly require information systems featuring increased interactivity, more flexibility, and the capability of dealing with fuzzy logic.[ citation needed ] Artificial intelligence may one day be useful in this aspect.

Collaboration in cross-functional teams

Many teams in large organizations face challenges around creating a collaborative atmosphere when dealing with cross-functional dependencies and peers from other functions. The structure of the organizations in general do not support cross-functional collaboration among the teams.

Smooth communication is the base of the cross-functional teams. Team must schedule all meetings, and prepare the agenda for each. Team must know of what is to be discussed. [8]

It becomes important for the organizations to build a culture among its employees, a sense of entitlement with each of the stakeholders to push them to give an extra effort and collaborate with other teams to achieve company goals. This is critical to proactive collaboration, beyond just at a time of crisis.

See also

Related Research Articles

Management is the administration of organizations, whether they are a business, a nonprofit organization, or a government body through business administration, nonprofit management, or the political science sub-field of public administration respectively. It is the process of managing the resources of businesses, governments, and other organizations.

In the field of management, strategic management involves the formulation and implementation of the major goals and initiatives taken by an organization's managers on behalf of stakeholders, based on consideration of resources and an assessment of the internal and external environments in which the organization operates. Strategic management provides overall direction to an enterprise and involves specifying the organization's objectives, developing policies and plans to achieve those objectives, and then allocating resources to implement the plans. Academics and practicing managers have developed numerous models and frameworks to assist in strategic decision-making in the context of complex environments and competitive dynamics. Strategic management is not static in nature; the models can include a feedback loop to monitor execution and to inform the next round of planning.

A marketing plan is a strategy or outline created to accomplish a marketing team's objectives. A marketing plan is often created together by marketing managers, product marketing managers, product managers, and sales teams. A marketing plan falls under the umbrella of the overall business plan.

Middle management is the intermediate management level of a hierarchical organization that is subordinate to the executive management and responsible for "team leading" line managers and/or "specialist" line managers. Middle management is indirectly responsible for junior staff performance and productivity.

A business process, business method or business function is a collection of related, structured activities or tasks performed by people or equipment in which a specific sequence produces a service or product for a particular customer or customers. Business processes occur at all organizational levels and may or may not be visible to the customers. A business process may often be visualized (modeled) as a flowchart of a sequence of activities with interleaving decision points or as a process matrix of a sequence of activities with relevance rules based on data in the process. The benefits of using business processes include improved customer satisfaction and improved agility for reacting to rapid market change. Process-oriented organizations break down the barriers of structural departments and try to avoid functional silos.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Information management</span> Organisational activity concerning information lifecycle

Information management (IM) is the appropriate and optimized capture, storage, retrieval, and use of information. It may be personal information management or organizational. IM for organizations concerns a cycle of organizational activity: the acquisition of information from one or more sources, the custodianship and the distribution of that information to those who need it, and its ultimate disposal through archiving or deletion and extraction.

An organizational structure defines how activities such as task allocation, coordination, and supervision are directed toward the achievement of organizational aims.

Span of control, also called span of management, is a term used in business management, particularly human resource management. The term refers to the number of subordinates or direct reports a supervisor is responsible for.

An Enterprise Information System (EIS) is any kind of information system which improves the functions of enterprise business processes by integration. This means typically offering high quality of service, dealing with large volumes of data and capable of supporting some large and possibly complex organization or enterprise. An EIS must be able to be used by all parts and all levels of an enterprise.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Incident Command System</span> Standardized approach to command, control, and coordination of emergency response

The Incident Command System (ICS) is a standardized approach to the command, control, and coordination of emergency response providing a common hierarchy within which responders from multiple agencies can be effective.

Coopetition or co-opetition is a neologism coined to describe cooperative competition. Coopetition is a portmanteau of cooperation and competition. Basic principles of co-opetitive structures have been described in game theory, a scientific field that received more attention with the book Theory of Games and Economic Behavior in 1944 and the works of John Forbes Nash on non-cooperative games. Coopetition occurs both at inter-organizational or intra-organizational levels.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Business process re-engineering</span> Business management strategy

Business process re-engineering (BPR) is a business management strategy originally pioneered in the early 1990s, focusing on the analysis and design of workflows and business processes within an organization. BPR aims to help organizations fundamentally rethink how they do their work in order to improve customer service, cut operational costs, and become world-class competitors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">NetOps</span>

NetOps is defined as the operational framework consisting of three essential tasks, Situational Awareness (SA), and Command & Control (C2) that the Commander (CDR) of US Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM), in coordination with DoD and Global NetOps Community, employs to operate, manage and defend the Global Information Grid (GIG) to ensure information superiority for the United States.

Organizing or organising is the establishment of effective authority-relationships among selected works, persons and workplaces in order for a group to work together efficiently, or the process of dividing work into sections and departments, which often improves efficiency.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dashboard (business)</span> Aggregate business progress report

In business computer information systems, a dashboard is a type of graphical user interface which often provides at-a-glance views of key performance indicators (KPIs) relevant to a particular objective or business process. In other usage, "dashboard" is another name for "progress report" or "report" and considered a form of data visualization. In providing this overview, business owners can save time and improve their decision making by utilizing dashboards.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to business management:

Capability management is a high-level management function, with particular application in the context of defense.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sales and operations planning</span> Integrated business management process

Sales and operations planning (S&OP) is an integrated business management process through which the executive/leadership team continually achieves focus, alignment, and synchronization among all organization functions. The S&OP process includes an updated forecast that leads to a sales plan, production plan, inventory plan, customer lead time (backlog) plan, new product development plan, strategic initiative plan, and resulting financial plan. Plan frequency and planning horizon depend on the specifics of the context. Short product life cycles and high demand volatility require a tighter S&OP than steadily consumed products. Done well, the S&OP process also enables effective supply chain management.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Director (business)</span> Title given to the senior management staff of a large organization

The term director is a title given to the senior management staff of businesses and other large organizations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Team effectiveness</span> A teams ability to accomplish their goals or objectives

Team effectiveness is the capacity a team has to accomplish the goals or objectives administered by an authorized personnel or the organization. A team is a collection of individuals who are interdependent in their tasks, share responsibility for outcomes, and view themselves as a unit embedded in an institutional or organizational system which operates within the established boundaries of that system. Teams and groups have established a synonymous relationship within the confines of processes and research relating to their effectiveness while still maintaining their independence as two separate units, as groups and their members are independent of each other's role, skill, knowledge or purpose versus teams and their members, who are interdependent upon each other's role, skill, knowledge and purpose.

References

  1. What is a Cross-functional Team? Definition and meaning
  2. Use of XFN as abbreviation
  3. A leadership blog named XFN.
  4. Krajewski, L. J. and L. P. Ritzman. 2005. Operations Management: Processes and Value Chains. Pearson Education, Upper Saddle River.
  5. Luo, Xueming; Slotegraaf, Rebecca J.; Xing, Pan (April 2006). "Cross-Functional "Coopetition":The Simultaneous Role of Cooperation and Competition Within Firms". Journal of Marketing. American Marketing Association. 70 (2): 67–80. doi:10.1509/jmkg.70.2.067. ISSN   1547-7185.
  6. Parcon, P. (2006) Develop Your Team Building Skills, Lotus Press, Jan 1, 2006
  7. Leybourn, E. (2013). Directing the Agile Organisation: A Lean Approach to Business Management. London: IT Governance Publishing: 71–79.
  8. "How We Built A Cross-Functional Team At Uptech" . Retrieved 2020-10-26.