The organization builds a new “Login with Facebook“ Feature for their app. They have multiple separate teams. One focusing on backend development, they actually finished the code. But waiting for the team of front developers to design the button, a tester to check its functionality, and a designer to ensure how it looks (user interface & user experience). Due to the improper coordination, the projects face delays, finger-pointing, and a lot of wasted time.
In these cases, the Scrum framework comes as a solution to fix this with a powerful idea called Cross-Functional Teams. In this article, what does Scrum mean by cross-functional teams elaborately.
Table of Contents
Understanding Cross-Functional Teams:
A cross-functional team is a group of people with all the skills needed to get the job done from start to finish. They don’t unnecessarily wait for help from an “outside” team. This team is packed with everyone to solve the problem on their own.
A famous study of “The Secrets of Great Teamwork” from the Harvard Business Review tells that teams with members from diverse backgrounds (such as design, engineering, and marketing) all together created significantly more innovative, better, and faster to market deliveries compared to non-cross-functional teams.
As a small startup that deploys Cross-Functional Teams has all key roles:
- The designer who understands the user
- The programmer who writes the code
- The tester who ensures quality
- And any other needful roles, all working together cooperatively from day one.
Scrum Values and Principles:
Scrum, an agile project management framework, is entirely based on five Scrum values, six principles, and three pillars. Those are,
Scrum Values:
- Commitment: Ensure team commitment to achieve its Sprint goals and support each other.
- Courage: Have the boldness to do the right things and to manage difficult situations.
- Focus: Encourage them to focus on the work at hand and the goals of that particular sprint first.
- Openness: Transparency and openness about the status of the work, and pave the way to discuss any challenges if they face.
- Respect: Make them respect each team member’s abilities and contributions.
Scrum Principles:
- Empirical Process Control: All decisions are made based on experience and observation, using transparency, inspection, and adaptation.
- Self-Organization: Empowering the team to function self-organizing, self-managing in every situation. This core agenda of Agile. It discourages always depending on others for directions.
- Time-Boxing: Allocate a fixed, maximum amount of time duration for every event to create focus and prevent long, endless discussions.
- Value-Based Prioritization: Giving preference to the most valuable features first
- Iterative Development: Tasks are broken into small, repetitive cycles and produce workable parts of the product one by one to achieve the final working product.
- Collaboration: Encourage all team members to work together towards common goals with a focused mindset.
How Scrum Enables Cross-Functionality:
The above Scrum Core values and principles are the main reasons to use and apply Scrum practices to create Cross-Functional Teams for any organization. The Scrum team itself is considered a cohesive unit consisting of Scrum Masters, product owners, and developers, who are all well-integrated.
Scrum makes teams work together in a flow and brings people with different skills into one small, self-managing group. Here are some of the ways Scrum makes cross-functionality happen:
1. Compact, Self-Organizing Teams:
By bringing together developers, testers, designers, and more, learn how to approach their work, instead of waiting for directions from managers. This builds Ownership, trust, and quicker decision-making.
2. Working in Short Cycles:
All tasks in Scrum are conducted in time-boxed events like short cycles. It generally takes two to four weeks of time. The aim of each cycle is to create a usable product that adds value. Everybody in the team, irrespective of their role, works together to achieve completion within the specific Sprint period.
3. Building T-Shaped Skills:
In the Scrum way of working, people are encouraged to specialize in one area deeper along with learning additional skills as an option. Let’s consider these cases, a developer may learn some testing techniques, and be allowed to learn some coding fundamentals. These learning techniques create a team as multi-talented and takes forward work when absence of some other professional.
4. Shared responsibility and Ownership:
Usually, different teams own different parts of the projects, but here the entire Scrum team owns the final product. Everyone is accountable for the outcome. This shared responsibility motivates the team members to help them solve problems together.
5. Through Training and Coaching:
Coaching and training are integral parts of Scrum. Professionals get the CSM certification course training to build and facilitate cross-functional teams because the work environments that adopt the Scrum framework require it for effective project delivery.
Conclusion:
Scrum always encourages autonomy for team members to make decisions and take tasks forward in any situation. That’s why Scrum is best suited for cross-functional team environments. Due to this, through collaboration, pairing, and mentoring, the team is always developing new skills and breaking barriers.
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