What’s the Cross-Functional Team, and Why should I have one?

Steve Johnson asks, "What’s the Cross-Functional Team, and Why should I have one?"

First of all, the definition is given as:

The cross-functional team is a group of people who collectively represent the entire organization's interests in a specific product or product family. This team provides benefits for the individuals on the team, the product and its customers, and the organization at large.

This is a counter trend to the proletarization of work, in which work is broken down into rote tasks that are easily learnt. This method of work decomposition allows for the mechanisation of tasks, easy replacement of workers, and downward pressure on wages as less skill is needed to replace a skilled worker.

The cost of this proletarisation has been the alienation of workers from their work. This is now seen as a huge cost in the production of goods.

Instead of having micro-managed workers doing highly defined tasks without reference to what anyone else is doing, the cross-functional team encourages workers to a higher view of the productive process.

A healthy team improves organizational alignment. Members are kept "in the know" regarding product status, including market research, customer feedback, product development progress, product-related financials, and promotional plans and events. Each member is held responsible for bringing that information back to their own department or team. In addition, they feed the team their own department or team's feedback. The cross-functional team allows us to get one representative group aligned; in turn, they exponentially increase organizational awareness and alignment.

What is left unsaid in this article is that Department II workers are being replaced by Department I workers. The latter have to be mananged differently in order to extract value from their labour.

The organisation of work cannot be done by the managers anymore. The work is too fluid to be precisely defined. If it is done so, the job definition is very likely to be obsolete.

The balance of power within the workplace is tipping in favour of the less politically reliable workforce.