Cross-functional alignment in an agile enterprise brings diverse expertise together to achieve common goals. The right alignment among the cross-functional teams fosters collaboration, adaptability, and quick value delivery to customers. By aligning the cross-team around shared goals, leaders can reduce misunderstandings between teams and improve performance. The article explores a few effective ways to achieve cross-team alignment in the organisation.
Agile teams are self-organising and can deliver work more quickly while adapting to changes. The team’s diverse expertise allows it to handle the job without dependencies on other teams in the organisation. The teams will take ownership of their work. The benefit of cross-functional team alignment in the agile organisation is to give them a shared understanding of the project and see how different tasks fit together to achieve the shared goal.
Cross-functional alignment within the organisation supports the efficient flow of work and the consistent sharing of knowledge and skills. If you are looking for cross-team alignment at scale, you should advance your agile skills through SAFe RTE Certification course.
Effective Ways of Cross-functional Team Alignment
- Define Shared Goals to Create a Unified Direction
Clear objectives are important for teams’ strong alignment, as they help them know what they are building, the importance of their task in the project, and the desired outcomes. The leaders have to chart the details that show vision, measurable outcomes, and success metrics. The leaders who are looking to foster better alignment between teams should facilitate a discussion and allow them to explain how their jobs contribute to the shared goals. Having a good understanding of their tasks transforms objectives into commitments.
- Create a Role Clarity
Role confusion hampers cross-team alignment in the organisation. The leaders should clarify the roles of each team member and the teams for every major deliverable, along with their accountability. There should be guidelines on the team’s decision-making authorities so that team members can easily approach them for guidance. Also, the leaders should be specific about the type of update each member gets during project progress. These guidelines help teams self-resolve conflicts because they are clear about their agreed-upon goals.
- Make the Teams Self-reliant
Cross-team alignment is just about giving the teams the blueprint for execution; it is about fostering their ability to solve the problem. The leaders should give teams the problems to solve and challenges to handle, making the teams self-resilient. The alignment between teams strengthens when leaders encourage cross-functional thinking. Right collaboration between the different teams strengthens their engagement, which in turn results in delivering better solutions than a top-down approach in a traditional leadership style. Agile leadership is all about empowering the teams with the needed autonomy to resolve the problems and trust their ability to bring better solutions.
- Align Teams and Leadership Through Feedback
Cross-team alignment in agile organisations is successful when leaders can establish two-way feedback. The teams should be allowed to voice their opinions in the conversations. The leaders need to schedule internal retrospectives to assess the status of business outcomes so teams can voice their opinions. When leaders listen to their teams and understand the ground reality, they can easily identify friction and take the necessary action to adjust the path without causing disruption.
- Facilitate the Escalation Path
Disagreements are common in cross-functional agile teams, but they should be perceived as opportunities to make better decisions. When a project depends on cross-functional team collaboration, leaders should establish clear escalation levels to resolve issues. It could be peer-to-peer resolution, project manager facilitation and executive decision. The time taken to resolve the conflicts depends on the level of resolution.
- Embrace Empathy Across Teams
The teams should be allowed to spend time with other functions to help them understand each other and know their constraints, rather than operating under different assumptions. Conduct sprint meetings with collaborative teams to foster a long-lasting understanding.
- Project Management Tools to Foster Better Alignment
Project management doesn’t create alignment, but can make it visible and sustainable across the organisation. These tools help cross-functional teams see how their work connects to other deliverables, so they understand internal dependencies before the problem arises. These tools foster better alignment across teams by enabling them to easily track progress on shared goals within the organisation, communicate the context of delays, and identify effective solutions. Project management tools show how different departments collaborate. These tools set up automated notifications for dependent teams in the event of any risks, so that they can be managed early.
- Have a Structured Communication
The leaders should have structured communication in the organisation to create predictable connection points. The leaders should conduct regular meetings to discuss accomplishments. forthcoming priorities and blockers that affect the functions of other teams. Facilitating weekly cross-functional meetings helps them discuss a structured agenda and build shared ownership. Schedule a monthly strategic review to examine the team’s alignment with business objectives.
- Align Incentives with Metrics
Achieving perfect alignment in the organisation is not about making the alignment perfect, but making it productive. The leaders looking to build a strong alignment in the organisation should recognise the team’s achievements and celebrate shared success. The leaders should identify milestones that require cross-functional collaboration and make the recognition public.
Conclusion
Cross-functional alignment in the agile organisation is challenging but achievable with effective and right strategies. Communication strategies that disrupt organisational priorities are key to alignment disruptions in agile organisations. The leaders can improve cross-functional collaboration in the organisation by defining clear goals and using project management tools to track the progress of shared goals. The teams can have a better track of the project progress and take collaborative actions to achieve shared goals.
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