Cross-functional collaboration and ways of working

Whether you’re used to working in large humanitarian organisations, mid-sized agencies or for seed startups there are two things you’re going to want to get right — communication and collaboration.

When I joined the British Red Cross (BRC) in October last year one of my first projects was to push through the build and pilot of the International Family Tracing (IFT) Online Referral form.

(Which our Service Designer, Vicky Houghton-Price, has written about here and here and our Product Sponsor, Amina Hussein, has also shared her experience on.)

One thing that became apparent to me and my Digital colleagues through this work was that collaboration, at least between our teams, was a little irregular and patchy and could therefore be improved.

Teaming up with my Digital counterpart (I sit within Digital Transformation) Beatriz Vega, who is also new to the BRC, we decided to do what we expect a lot of new employees do, which is to examine how our departments work. In our case that meant looking into delivery.

Being delivery people it was important for us to have a plan and establish ways of working, including approach, objectives and agreed platforms and tools. We were effectively our first test case for collaboration.

As well as improving how we worked we knew we wanted to use this exercise to get to know the people and the skills behind the job titles and to foster closer working relationships, developing shared practices for delivery. This meant consulting as many people and teams as we could.

First we did the following:

• Agreed on and used Trello to track our activities
• Agreed on and used Confluence for documentation, including our roadmap
• Agreed which departments we wanted to speak to (though, naturally this grew as the more we spoke to people the more recommendations we received of who to speak to)
• Created and agreed to follow a communication plan, to inform others both inside and outside of our organisation of our progress, including internal Show & Tells and external blog entries

Trello activity board

At this stage it might have also have been a good idea to work out who does what and divide up the work equally. Fortunately however, Beatriz and I share a similar mindset and approach to work, which meant we could be a little less structured and approach our ways of working more organically.

We were also very conscious and sensitive to the fact that we were new to the organisation and didn’t want to be seen as being authoritative or overstretching our boundaries.

Whilst constructing our approach to the project and its objectives we made sure to check-in and sense-check what we were thinking with more tenured people in our departments.

For our objectives we collectively agreed to:

1. Improve ways of working at a project level, so briefs are shared and agreed by teams, and projects start with a kick-off
2. Record the skills and expertise of the BRC’s digital teams, so that everyone is informed of who does what
3. Consult with PMO on project documentation, in order to avoid duplication and different approaches
4. Collaborate more within the Information and Digital Technology (I&DT) directorate, so teams are informed and can plan effectively

Roadmap in Confluence

For our approach we first broke down all the project tasks we could think of and then spoke with teams including but not limited to Service Design (representing Service Design and User Research), PMO, Product, Architecture, Infrastructure, Development and CRM & Data.

Before we met representatives from these teams we approached them informally to introduce ourselves, what we were doing and why. We provided advanced access to the project tasks and roles and responsibilities we had so far, for review prior to our meeting.

Each meeting took 15-30 minutes. We verified that the roles and responsibilities we’d assumed were correct and asked how each team currently worked with our teams and questioned if this differed to how they would like to work with us in the future. If needed we set up follow up meetings.

The sessions were something to look forward to, somewhere we could meet our colleagues and find out a bit about them and how they like to work and begin to plan how we could get closer to our shared goal of greater collaboration.

We learnt a lot from these conversations and we shared our key insights with the wider directorate in our first internal Show & Tell earlier this month. We learnt:

1. There is a desire to meet more regularly as a wider team, so that people can be informed of work early on and work more collaboratively
2. There is a gap in our skillset which means some roles, like Service Designer or Back-End Developer, have additional responsibilities, like User Research and Quality Assurance respectively
3. That some roles share some of the same responsibilities, like Business Analyst and Service Designer, or Service Designer and User Experience Designer

Not all the discoveries we’ve made are in our remit to action, but what we have done is set up a monthly meeting with representatives from all the teams we spoke to and created a forum where we can get together, share what we’re working on and troubleshoot as a cross-functional group.

This is only the start however and there are still more teams to speak to, project sizing co-design exercises to undertake and what will potentially be our trickiest task — preparing a capability matrix so that we have a library of digital skills available to all at the BRC. We’re looking forward to some rewarding challenges.