Sense and Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously

by Jeff Gothelf

Once you have cross-functional teams, you need to ensure they are dedicated to a single mission at a time and that the staff is dedicated to the team. Again, this may not be as simple as it sounds. It can be vexingly difficult. Often, there is more work to do than staff to do it. As a result, organizations try to squeeze more work out of each staff member by assigning the staffer to multiple projects. In a physical factory, the absurdity of this way of assigning work is obvious. You can’t have someone working at two manufacturing stations simultaneously. But with thought work, the work itself is so abstract that it can shape-shift when assignments are being considered. The problem with assigning staff to multiple teams or multiple projects is that it creates dependencies among projects, and dependencies reduce flow. Although a single team can schedule tasks together and optimize its flow internally, it becomes much harder for two teams to schedule tasks together. If a designer has to produce a drawing for team A, then her work for team B is idled until that drawing is complete. And if two people on team A have responsibilities to other teams—for example, the designer owes work to team A and the developer owes work to team C—then the scheduling problem suddenly multiplies in complexity and rapidly becomes unmanageable. It is far better to keep things simple and efficient by dedicating staff to a single team and dedicating that team to a single mission.