Cross-team coordination patterns – Oblivious

With the advent of what I call the second generation of scaling approaches out there, maybe it’s time to dive deeper into the patterns that larger organizations underlie.

I have been cooking this blog entry series for a while now in my head. Time to get some structure to it. This first entry deals with organizations that are oblivious to their need for cross-team coordination practices.

It’s easy to fall into the oblivious category. Actually, I think it’s a trap that some companies set out for themselves.

These companies do not realize that their teams have a need to coordinate across teams. Sometimes they set themselves up to do so.

The problem usually is this: The company had to deal in the past with an ever growing product. At a certain point, divide-and-conquer strategies were applied to the underlying organizational problem, cutting down the product into multiple parts. Unfortunately, someone with a technical background was in charge of doing so, so the company ended up with different technical teams.

Stemming from statistical process control and the underlying Tayloristic views, the company ends up with a front-end department and a back-end departments. Or a user interface group, a middleware group, and a database group, Or… I think you get the point.

These companies are usually lead in a way to optimize all the parts, therefore the overall product will be optimized. Unfortunately, that thought could not be further from the truth. A friend of mine used to say

If everyone thinks about themselves first, everyone is thought about.

(I’m not sure whether that translates that well.)

Problems arise from ignoring the interconnectedness of all the parts to form a solution for people out there. These “people out there” might be customers in the market, they might be internal users. If part of an overall solution is optimized for itself, the interconnectedness of the different parts may eventually yield a less-than-optimal overall solution to one or more than the other parts of the solution.

Companies that are oblivious to the need for cross-team coordination also don’t recognize the interconnectedness of the different teams. Thus they fall short to deliver a good product, since they might have optimized their AI-efforts, but the user interface lacks clarity. Or they might have invested in a high-performing database solution, but their middleware was written by the last five generation of interns.

Of course, I’m over-dramatizing.

I’ll be looking at other patterns of cross-team coordination in up-coming posts to maybe offer some different perspectives.

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