Cross-functionality and Survival

Whatever happened to synergy? For quite a while in the 90s and early 2000s, synergy was the buzzword for the paradigm shifts that restructured the leadership landscape. When the dust settled and the hype dissipated, higher degrees of process integration and cross-functionality remained. These two synergistic elements continue to improve organizational profitability and efficiency. However, they have become the hands that not only give, but that also take away.
In the last quarter of 2013, Jack Neff, writing in Advertising Age, reported on a move by Unilever that “slashed more than 800 marketing positions” describing it as “an acceleration of a widespread downsizing of marketing departments.” He supported that observation with examples of the loss of 1000 marketing positions by Proctor & Gamble and reductions of marketing departments by Colgate-Palmolive, Energizer Holdings, and Johnson & Johnson, “among other companies.”
Many of these losses can be attributed to one of these two hands, process integration. Though not the defining characteristic, an element of process integration is identifying and reducing duplication of efforts. According to Neff, “[B]ehind the recent wave of marketing-department cuts: companies are trying to unravel the overlapping duties of the global and local organizations set up in the 1990s. Global marketers are winning at the expense of regional ones.” How can marketers who’ve been displaced from local and regional organizations survive? By using the other hand—cross-functionality.
The Scrum framework for project management is known for successfully employing cross-functionality. A Guide to the Scrum Body of Knowledge (SBOK™) says that the framework does this through the use of cross-functional Scrum Teams whose “members are generalist/specialists in that they have knowledge of various fields and are experts in at least one.” The newly displaced or about-to-be displaced marketer could find survival in surrounding him- or herself with other generalist/specialists in a team that capitalizes on their strengths. This team could then strategize and place itself in a position to offer business value.
That positioning could be in step with another market trend. Writing for Business Dictionary.com, Leo Sun says, “Large tech companies such as IBM and Hewlett Packard employ a large mix of both kinds of outsourcing [IT and business processes] in order to cut costs and preserve margins.” Noting that outsourcing is “a business model that has been around for ages,” Sun points out that outsourcing is a way companies of all sizes deal with tighter markets and the need for specialization—focusing on core business strengths. He also says that companies not as large as IBM may simply need “a few extra outsourced helpers, readily available in your home country, to pitch in during a product launch.” Among these “outsourced helpers,” he lists “sales and marketing staff.” Here then is an opportunity for a cross-functional team or company that has general marketing knowledge to develop specialized product launch expertise and become a profitable, strategic partner with numerous innovative companies of all sizes.
Scrum practices and insight greatly increase the odds of a cross-functional team being successful. Organizations such as the Project Management Institute (PMI) and SCRUMstudy offer certifications and training in Scrum and Agile frameworks in order to help organizations beyond software development be more agile and workers to be more valuable and employable.
In his 1996 bestseller, Jobshift, Richard Bridges noted that the careers of the twentieth century would become the jobs of the twenty-first, in which workers would move from one project to the next and from one employer to the next much as craftsmen did in earlier economic periods. Modern computer programmers, web designers, graphic designers, and software testers are examples of this type of workforce and are identified by Sun as functionalities that are typically outsourced. Many market and business trends, such as those noted above, indicate the need for modern workers to be specialists who have the general knowledge necessary to easily interface with many product and service organizations.
The Scrum and Agile frameworks shared by companies such as SCRUMstudy help companies and individuals develop the flexibility, adaptability, and creativity to be successful in the world’s evolving markets and workforces. In identifying how Scrum’s management approach is more appropriate to today’s market, Ruth Kim VP of Academics at VMEdu, Inc., says, “Scrum does not fight change, as other approaches do, that is why it can be so reactive and successful in certain fast-changing environments. The close collaboration between the cross-functional team members and the customer/Product Owner allow rapid feedback loops to be able to try out and learn from many more approaches than in a rigid Waterfall approach.”
Kim’s insights reinforce the idea that the survival of today’s workers, such as displaced marketing staff, may very well depend on their ability to be cross-functional and to form and work with cross-functional teams.

Works cited

Kim, Ruth. In an email to the author November 21, 2013.
Neff, Jack. (9 December 2013) “Who’s Next to Fall? Unilever’s Massive Job Cuts Put Other Marketers on Notice.” Advertising Age. (10 December 2013) http://adage.com/article/news/unilever-s-massive-job-cuts-put-marketers-notice/245587/.
Satpathy, Tridibesh, (2013) A Guide to the Scrum Body of Knowledge. USA: SCRUMstudy™.
Sun, Leo. (2012) “Outsourcing Your Business.” BusinessDictionary.com. (11 December 2013) http://www.businessdictionary.com/article/304/outsourcing-your-business/.

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The Need for a Sustainable Pace.

Imagine you are participating in a marathon. For most of the race you maintain a steady pace, conserving energy and stamina for the last leg when you push for the finish line. What if you were expected to run the entire race like you were running a 100 meter sprint? Not only would it be impossible to maintain that speed throughout, you are likely to suffer burnout and might end up quitting the race halfway. Even though Agile projects are split into iterations or “sprints,” that does not mean they are similar to sprint races in which how fast you are determines whether you win or lose.

Agile projects run in a fast-paced environment where everything is time-boxed and change requests are the norm. Just when you think that you are about to complete an iteration, the customer will want to include new features or suggest changes to ones that have already been completed. Expectations of stakeholders run high on Agile projects and they can end up confusing quick delivery with efficiency and quantity for quality; thus leading to  unrealistic expectations. Agile teams realize that the iteration they are finishing is just one lap in the whole race. An entire relay in not run in just one leg. To finish the entire race, the Agile team must develop realistic expectations.
If we want to be successful on Agile projects, we need to provide results consistently at a rate that we can sustain. This does not mean we decide to work at a slow pace, but we need to perform at an optimum rate during which we can deliver value and at the same time be motivated to continue doing so for long periods of time.

[JP1] Working longer hours does not necessarily ensure that more work gets done. Writing for CNN in late 2012, Robert Pozen, author of Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results, Reduce Your Hours, asserted, “Long hours at work wear people down mentally. All too often, I see professionals work to 8, 9, or 10 every night and go into the office every day of every weekend, even if there is no real crisis. While these professionals might be increasing their output over the short-term, this type of overwork inevitably leads to burnout. And if you’re burned out, you’re not productive.” Numerous experts have noted that a person’s efficacy drops if he or she works longer than 40 hours a week.  When stretched beyond this, workers are prone to making errors and producing output of poor quality. Rectifying errors and reworking to improve quality require additional time and resources, thus costing the organization financially and frustrating the custmoer. When long work hours are made mandatory, team members can become disheartened and ease off.

Overtime is sometimes inevitable on a project, but it is important that overtime is scheduled to limit negative impacts on the productivity of the team. For example, some experts suggest that team members should not work 50+ hours per week for more than two weeks in a row.

One of the reasons Agile and Scrum stresses that team members come up with estimates themselves rather than managers or customers, is that since team members are the ones who actually develop, they can more accurately do the estimating. Managers or product owners, on the other hand, might not be aware of the nuances of the work that needs to be done and therefore set unrealistic targets. For most managers, allowing teams to set their own pace can be difficult, and that is why trust between all stakeholders is a key requirement to make Agile projects work successfully.

Every team must determine the pace that they can sustain and at which they can provide high quality output. Wisely paced sprints in the short run combine to conquer the marathon in the long run.

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