The Ultimate Cross-functional Team

Oct-2-2007

Post written by Chris Spagnuolo. Follow Chris on Twitter Add comment

I am an avid cyclist and a rabid cycling fan. I was looking at a photo today of Team CSC during a Team Time Trial at last year’s Tour de France. It occured to me that the Team Time Trial (TTT) may be the perfect example of a cross-functional team. For those of you not familiar with the TTT, it is a bicycle race where teams of cyclists race against the clock to complete a specified race course. The TTT is usually held as a single stage of larger 2-3 week races like the Tour de France. The time for the team is based on the team’s last rider to cross the finish line. Teammates work together by rotating through the lead position and resting in the draft of the other riders when they are not leading. In this way, the task of setting the pace is shared. What’s amazing is that the riders on the team are usually specialists in different areas of cycling: they are climbers, sprinters, domestiques, individual time trialists, or general classification guys. But in the TTT, they put their specialties aside and all ride for one common goal: to cross the finish line with the best team time. If the slowest team member falls out of the group during the race, they wait for him, and help him get back up to speed. Once they’re back together, they can achieve their maximum efficiency as a team again. The TTT team truly operates in a cross-functional manner.

One of the main downfalls of the waterfall approach to software development is it’s insistence on functional specialization. In waterfall, the popular belief is that only an analyst can gather requirements, only programmers write code, only DBA’s work on database problems, and only QA analysts can perform testing. This thinking leads to projects becoming stalled when a functional specialist in unavailable. Scrum is just the opposite. The focus of Scrum is on cross-functional teams. Scrum absolutely relies on each member of the Scrum team to do their share of the work. The team pulls together to accomplish one common goal. This means anyone on the team can and should work on tasks that may not be within their expertise. Usually there is someone on the team with functional expertise to lead a specific task, but anyone on the team can do the work. In Scrum, it is never an individual who is responsible for the team not finishing their work, it is the Team that did not finish their work. When the Scrum team wants to reach it’s maximum efficiency, all Team members do whatever it takes to complete the work of their current Sprint. To that end, Scrum Teams need to become totally cross-functional to operate at their maximum efficiency. In that sense, it seems that cycling’s TTT teams may be the ultimate cross-functional Scrum Teams.