As evidenced by the pandemic, businesses have been forced to go digital for customer/employee convenience. With all things remote, right from tracking employee performances to monitoring customer dashboards, a paradigm shift had to happen in how leaders approach and strategize their business.
Now, CIOs and CTOs need to refocus their own and their teams’ strategies on what constitutes agility and success, as it’s no longer just about budget or competition. It’s now speed to value. Leaders are required to build cross-functional teams, which might imply a cultural shift (without eating strategy) for a lot of organizations.
But What are Cross-Functional Teams?
Cross-functional teams, also known as agile teams, are a mix of business and IT that could be much more productive and accelerate things full-scale. Since these teams constitute both developers and consumers, they are highly impactful at ensuring seamless end-user delivery.
Why Build Cross-Functional Teams?
Before setting out on a digital transformation journey, leaders need to pause and reflect on the current bottlenecks.
At a high level, connecting people, systems, and processes is what every digital transformation journey is aimed at.
From a development standpoint, the reactive methods don’t work anymore. No longer is it possible for IT to build something first and then have the business to disagree with them. Teams have to develop a proactive mindset. Wherein, both business and IT can work together to keep the business moving forward with a strategic agenda.
But how to bring in this kind of synergy within the teams?
Revealing the Magic Potion: Harnessing the Energy of Your People
No matter how big or small your organization is, the true force multiplier is people. To cultivate the mindset of continuous innovation, remember to invest in people, purpose, and culture.
The secret sauce to retaining talent and innovating continuously is to make your teams feel productive.
By making people become part of small teams, you can make them feel more productive as they start to feel more organized. Teams can prioritize better because they know what’s expected of them.
Teams can work on auto-pilot without having to wait for directions from their higher-ups. The underlying reason for such self-direction could be increased productivity. By giving more autonomy, teams are also fostered with a sense of belongingness.
Imagine, enabling the People Ops team to partner with IT to build a custom people analytics dashboard to gain greater visibility into diversity, workforce retention, and attrition.
Sounds super-thoughtful right?
Smaller teams also bring in a lot of transparency within the organization. The quality of the relationship between the leaders and the teams will eventually improve as employees feel more empowered and not exhausted.
With this sense of ownership, people grow to realize how their day-to-day jobs align with the organization’s bigger goals.
4 Steps to Building a Productive Cross-Functional Team
- Establish a clear vision and mission for your digital transformation journey. Ensure everyone on the team is in alignment with it.
- Identify the true potential of your team members. Define roles based on the identified expertise.
- Liberate your team to make decisions on their own. Democratize technology for them to build what they want to build at full-scale.
- Create a platform where your teams can turn their ideas into reality. This will allow you to improve your room for innovation drastically.
Big Takeaway: Continuous Improvement is Key to Building Agile Teams
Here’s how you can enable continuous improvement in your organization:
- Remember to invest in people, purpose, and culture as you focus on building agile teams and processes alongside. Start seeing technology as a foundational capability and ensure your workforce also buys into this idea.
- Allow teams to take chances and fail. It’s a comprehensive way to learn. Ultimately, this reduces the need for manual directions and enables your teams to become more self-directed.
- Cultivate a product mindset to get your teams into that flow and rhythm of digital transformation. A product mindset helps bring in a collective identity to everyone on the team.
- Uncover new techniques to deliver faster. Design what people need to help them liberate and innovate endlessly.
If you’re looking for the right tech that can help you continuously improve your digital transformation journey and hence build an agile team, let us know. We can help expedite innovation and hence your ROI 5x faster with Kissflow Low-Code Platform.
