Successful Teamwork: Focus on customer value
In the previous article on successful teamwork, I mentioned several times that all skills must be present in a team in order to be able to satisfy the customer’s needs. Now, I would like to describe ways to implement how teams can focus on customer value.
Cross-functional teams
Formally, a team is a group of people trying to work together to complete a task or achieve a goal. Classically, teams in companies are therefore formed according to tasks. An obvious idea here is to divide the tasks into functions or phases, for example development, production, marketing, logistics, customer service and so on. The resulting expert teams have the advantage that team members can exchange information on “their” topics, benefit from experience and quickly replace resources in the event of a problem. The most experienced member can be promoted to team leader, thus ensuring the quality of the work and the employees.
A major disadvantage of these expert teams is that they are mono-functional. As soon as a task requires more than one function, dependencies exist between the teams. The resulting complexity is difficult to manage. This leads to waiting times for answers, many meetings, and declining quality because the expert knowledge is often trapped in the team silos. Sometimes someone is held accountable to manage this complexity, but most of the time the complexity is too hard to keep track of.
However, if the organization is not structured by phases or functions, but by products, a radically different perspective emerges. Now, experts from different functions are needed to develop a product. This minimizes interfaces with other teams, which leads to a massive acceleration of projects. Ideally, the entire value chain of a product is covered by one team.
Of course, this idea is not new, project teams are usually structured exactly according to this principle. These are often referred to as interdisciplinary trams, in the agile world they are usually called cross-functional teams.
Team structure
For the team structure, the crucial question is whether the team should be focused on the product or on the customer. This sounds like a negligible difference, but it is essential for the business strategy.
A team that is focused on a product tries to develop the product further. It primarily creates added value for the product, and indirectly added value for the customer. The team is usually given a list of requirements, and works on their implementation. This is usually difficult enough, as it requires not only that the team members are recruited from the necessary experts, but also that the team is allowed to make all decisions concerning the product.
A team that is focused on the customer tries to solve the customer’s problems. It thus directly creates added value for the customer. Accordingly, a customer-value-optimizing team needs other capabilities to identify customer problems. The simplest way to install this capability in the team is to integrate people with appropriate roles (e.g., business analysts) into the team.
Other options are based on further training of team members so that they are able to identify customer problems and translate them into solutions. Training, mentoring, coaching, pairing with business analysts are effective methods, and it would also be an option for business analysts to work on the team for a limited period of time until the team has learned the relevant skills.
Of course, when putting together a team, it should also be considered that the personalities of the team members match. Just because the individual team members are each the best person for a subtask does not mean that they will make a good team as a whole. In most cases, however, team composition is not a major problem, since nowadays just about everyone is used to teamwork and is correspondingly team-oriented and cooperative.
Team support
Depending on the team’s level of autonomy (see the previous article) and on how long a team has been working together, a team will need support to work well. This is related to both the tasks to be undertaken and the different phases of team development. Therefore, in the Scrum framework, two roles are created to provide support: The Product Owner and the Scrum Master.
The central focus of the Product Owner is the product. He must ensure that the work done by the team also delivers added value for the product. If the Product Owner is appointed externally, this usually means that he defines and prioritizes tasks (user stories). In the case of customer-value-optimizing teams, this leads to a contradiction. The team wants to solve customer problems, but the Product Owner wants to add value to the product. Therefore, in the case of customer-value-optimizing teams, it is common for the teams themselves to define the tasks, while the Product Owner merely takes over the prioritization.
The Scrum Master is supposed to make sure that the team successfully goes through the different phases of team development. At the same time, he must ensure that the team is always improving in the sense of Inspect & Adapt. Most Scrum Masters fulfil these tasks particularly well when they have no development tasks in the team and supervise no more than two teams.
Summary
If a team is to develop a product based on customer requirements, certain skills are needed in the team for this purpose. For this purpose, the necessary skills and decision-making competencies must be bundled or built up in the team. At the same time, a team should be accompanied, especially at the beginning.
