Chapter 1: Understanding Cross-Functional Teams

Fostering collaboration among your delivery, design, and quality assurance teams is vital for program success.

Why This Guide is Essential

Cross-functional teams (XFTs) play a crucial role in the success of a program. The advantages of such teams include enhanced innovation and efficiency stemming from diverse skill sets and expertise. However, managing teams from different departments necessitates careful coordination and resource management to ensure seamless transitions of outputs.

Here are the three primary challenges faced when overseeing XFTs:

1. Breaking down tasks and ensuring accountability for handovers between teams.
2. Aligning timelines across various teams to maintain a harmonious workflow.
3. Establishing a system that can adapt swiftly to changing user requirements to deliver value effectively.

This guide aims to provide a structured implementation approach grounded in the principles of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), an effective methodology for program management, to address these challenges.

The implementation strategy follows a high-level delivery plan involving cross-functional agile teams, as illustrated below.

This delivery plan is built on three essential principles to ensure program success:

• Rapid value delivery through integrated learning cycles.
• Continuous evaluation of solutions against key performance indicators (KPIs) at various milestones.
• Customization to fit the teams' structure and technological environment.

The Role of Collaboration Tools

Managing a program demands extensive coordination. Utilizing a collaboration tool is often recommended to streamline task and work item tracking across teams. In my experience, I utilize JIRA as my primary collaboration tool.

What is JIRA?

JIRA is an enterprise-level tool designed to unify teams and facilitate project collaboration. It comprises various components tailored to meet different project requirements. This guide will focus specifically on employing JIRA for effective coordination among teams.

The components covered in this article include:

• Project boards that delineate boundaries across multiple projects.
• Sprint boards that monitor and display the workflow and status of tasks.
• Product backlog that encompasses a list of stories and issues to be managed.
• Workflows that direct issues from one team to another.
• Reports that aid in the strategic planning of future sprints.

Configuring Components for XFT Success

Tailoring these components slightly can enhance clarity and accountability in deliverables. The examples provided will primarily focus on a single project, but the same configurations can be adapted for multiple projects with minimal adjustments.

1. Project Boards

Each team maintains its own project board, ensuring visibility only into relevant information.

Custom views are achieved using filters based on story labels, functioning similarly to hashtags. Examples include UX_DESIGN and APP_DESIGN, which indicate the responsibilities of the design and architecture teams, respectively. Once a team completes their tasks, the labels are updated accordingly, causing the items to disappear from their board.

2. Sprint Boards

Each team also has sprint boards organized into columns reflecting their respective workflows. A column may contain stories or issues at various workflow stages.

A delivery team might adopt the following column names:

• Sprint backlog: Additional stories to deliver if possible, including enhancements based on user feedback.
• To-do: Prioritized stories for the current sprint based on the team’s capacity, reviewed by a lead engineer or business analyst.
• In-design: Stories currently being designed.
• In-development: Stories under engineering development.
• Development complete: Completed stories awaiting governance review.
• In-UAT: Stories deployed for testing by the product owner and users.
• Ready for deployment: Stories approved for production deployment by the DevOps engineer.

The sprint board provides an overview of team progress at a glance, usually updated and reviewed daily.

3. Product Backlog

Stories and issues in the product backlog are transferred across teams using labels, filters, and workflows.

Each story adheres to strict guidelines to ensure minimal friction in information transfer. Key principles include:

• Independence: Minimizing dependencies allows for parallel feature shipping and testing.
• Consistency: Maintaining a uniform format for stories, bugs, and tests.
• Modularity: Ensuring manageable workloads for incremental value delivery.

For more information on creating effective user stories in JIRA for Agile projects, additional guides are available.

4. Workflows

Workflows are customized to route stories and issues to the appropriate teams based on their statuses for further action.

An example of a workflow in an XFT might include:

BACKLOG -> TODO_DESIGN -> IN_DESIGN -> DESIGN_COMPLETE -> TODO_APP -> IN_APP_DESIGN -> APP_DESIGN_COMPLETE -> TODO_DEV -> IN_DEV -> DEV_COMPLETE -> TODO_SIT -> DEPLOY_COMPLETE -> DONE

This workflow structure promotes accountability and governance through reviews and approvals across teams.

5. Reports

Velocity charts are utilized during sprint retrospectives to optimize resource allocation and workload for upcoming sprints.

These charts illustrate the story points completed by each team, allowing for workload adjustments in future sprints to align with team capacity.

The Advantages of This Approach

My experience suggests that this method is particularly effective for coordinating XFTs with over ten members. The primary benefits include:

• Efficiency: Teams operate concurrently with minimal dependencies, enhancing flexibility in schedules and deliverables.
• Accountability: Clear transitions of issues among parties, easily tracked via sprint boards.
• Governance: New teams can be onboarded to adopt a similar structure, promoting scalability.

These advantages enable projects to progress rapidly while adapting to changing requirements by reallocating resources or adjusting deliverables.

Potential Challenges

While many Agile frameworks exist, it’s crucial to approach their adoption with care, as each organization has unique needs. Key considerations include:

• Technology and Process Maturity: Neglecting legacy systems may impact processes and delivery timelines.
• Organizational Structure: Variability in team size and setup can affect communication and project dynamics, especially across different time zones.
• Program Scale and Complexity: Lack of expertise and resources can escalate risks and costs.

There is no universal solution for managing XFTs. I hope this article serves as a valuable reference for managing your digital programs.

For further insights on JIRA best practices, please refer to this link.

Thank you for your time, and I hope you found this information beneficial! :)

Chapter 2: Enhancing Collaboration with JIRA

In this chapter, we will explore how JIRA can streamline cross-functional collaboration.

This video discusses how JIRA Premium's advanced planning features simplify collaboration across diverse teams, enhancing efficiency and productivity.

Chapter 3: Managing Cross-Team Agile Programs

In this section, we will delve into strategies for managing agile programs across teams using JIRA and MYOB.

This video features insights into managing cross-team agile programs, highlighting best practices for collaboration and effective management.