How would you manage several cross-functional teams working together?

Question

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

From my perspective, to get cross functional teams working together it is key to
communicate clearly, work efficiently and build trust.
One of the first steps to working with cross-functional teams is to define
clearly roles & responsibilities. This helps to avoid confusion, duplicated
tasks or conflicts of work. Also helps team members to stay focus on their
tasks.
Set manageable project goals is also key for cross-functional collaboration.
Define SMART goals help team members to understands the objectives,
expectations, and timelines.
Communication is essential for any team, but especially for cross-functional
teams, who may have different backgrounds, languages, or styles. So clear and
direct conversation with team members, asking questions, clarifying doubts to
keep everyone on the same page. à Tools: regular meetings, email, Slack,
repositories & Jira
Providing visibility to the stakeholders helps to keep updated regarding project
progress to all parts involved. Understanding progress in real-time enables
teams to adapt fast to changes and readjust strategy if needed.
Build trust among team members is also key. PMs must be honest and transparent
with team members to build credibility. Also encouraging team members have open
discussions during core team meetings and express their ideas openly with
respect is an important part of collaboration between teams.

Anonymous · Answer

Good planning, open and honest communication, good prioritization and goals
alignment.
Everything starts with the answers to the questions of what are we doing and why
are we doing it now? Having clear answers to those questions will help create
the program charter and get initial alignment with stakeholders, sponsors and
program participants.
Open and honest communication is very important to help identify dependencies in
cross functional areas and also for effective risk management.
Alignment in prioritization from a program global perspective helps avoiding
misunderstanding when teams prioritize the work that is important for them.
Defining goals and objectives early in the program planning to ensure cross
functional teams contribute to share goals and helping everyone contributing to
the program to have a clear idea of the impact of their work.
For example when managing the program for Google Home Infrastructure I started
with a proposal to improve infrastructure however as I started talking to
multiple potential stakeholders and teams the scope of the program grew at least
3X. As this was at the program planning stage the requests to increase the scope
allowed me to negotiate resources.
Product wanted to be able to detect bugs early in the development process and a
semi automated release process, engineering wanted faster builds and faster
build validation signals, testing wanted reliable infrastructure with less false
positives. Detecting dependencies, prioritizing projects from a program global
perspective allowed the different teams to focus on the common end goals rather
than individual team priorities.
Evaluating program progress for individual projects as weekly standups allowed
to identify risks  early in the process and evaluating the program progress
every couple of weeks allowed to keep alignment and communicate cross functional
challenges.

Anonymous · Answer

i would develop a clear communication plan among cross-functional teams. I will
utilize Ghantt based roadmaps to outline sequential verses parallel activities
with clear deadlines. I will organize weekly status meetings to track the
progress and any risks. Create a common team space to discuss any schedule
conflicts and work together as a team.

Anonymous · Answer

The key to cross-functional teams working together is having an open ended
communication. This would help in fostering any kind of issues the team is
facing. Also having a Sprint board, with every feature ticket with the team
assignee, would give a better picture of how the work in progress is and who is
the concerned team member to check on for a particular feature change or ticket.
There are lot of times when there are situations when a team is dependent on
another team, to proceed with the work. At this point, as a technical program
manager can check for the long term goal of the project and see what could fit
in the time line for alternative tasks that the Engineering team could pick up
and make sure they are good to advance. Also determining the dependencies and
checking how that can be reduced / eliminated  could help to get work done
synchronously. Very simple example being, the UI team depended on the B.E
developers for apis  to have proper data retrievals to display in f.E and  show
up  some graphs based on search criteria, would have suitable amount of work to
be done from B.e and F.E. In this case we would foster both teams to have
effective communication, so that B.e team can give a fair idea of the api
signatures and the response formats, so that UI can have an idea on how they can
expect the data from B.E and proceed further with design changes

Anonymous · Answer

Must Communicate early, earn trust, understand the deliverables, understand the
challenges and risk mitigation. Delegate when necessary. Have cadences
frequently.

Anonymous · Answer

Cross functional teams have to be always in sync by continuous communication.
The teams should be very well aware of what is expected to happen in the
upcoming sprints at a high level at all times. Taking feedbacks, signing off
changes before deployment etc are the key steps.

How would you manage several cross-functional teams working together?

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