How To Build A Cross-Functional Agile Team
Cross-functional teams in Agile and Scrum
There are many kinds of teams in different organizations. Some teams seem like they are always developing something without ever releasing anything. Other teams are always extremely hard-working while feeling underappreciated because others see them as their bottleneck.
Exceptional teams can generate value with every iteration with nothing to hold back their creativity and engineering excellence. But how can such successful teams be formed in your organization?
Functional vertical teams
Teams are often established around a specific function that they are asked to perform within an organization. For example, you can have a QA team that is purely focused on testing software before releases. The function of that team is QA. In organizations, such functional teams can also be called vertical.
The challenge with vertical teams is that they often focus on a specific step within a waterfall delivery. Therefore you have your project management team, design team, development team, QA team, operations team, and so on. Such teams are not able to deliver value independently.
The work needs to be prioritized and scheduled across all the teams with huge communication and change management challenges to get any feature done.
Because of complicated dependencies, in organizations with functional vertical teams, it seems like everyone is always extremely busy, but nothing is actually getting finished.
Cross-functional horizontal teams
Cross-functional horizontal teams are the desirable best practice in Agile. The official Scrum Guide says:
“Scrum Teams are cross-functional, meaning the members have all the…