Every agile enthusiast will tell you how powerful a self-empowered cross-functional team can be. Once you have one, it brings complete team accountability from product idea to customer support, it naturally grows with continuous improvement, and finds self motivation in innovation and delivery of customer value.
It’s a beautiful and powerful concept; the practical implementation sometimes is not so beautiful and more often than not what you get, is a cross-dysfunctional team.
Let’s have a look at the cross-dysfunctional examples I have experienced.
Pseudo specialist cross-dysfunctional team
Developer: “I am a developer I am not meant to test, the testers test!”
Tester: “I don’t need to know anything about how the product is designed, I only care about how the customers use it!”
Business Analyst: “I am not technical, I can’t help you guys!”
“As Long As It Works for us” cross-dysfunctional team
Developer: “It works in our environments, it’s operations responsibility to make it work in production”
Tester: ”Listen, it worked in UAT, it must be a configuration issue, or a missing firewall hole and nothing I could have spotted during testing…”
Customer: “Hello! Nothing works here…”
Abdicating cross-dysfunctional team
Developer: “The architect told me to do it like this”
Tester: “Feck it, let the Test manager deal with it”
Business Analyst: “I don’t think there is any value in this story, but the Product Owner wants it, so get on with it and develop it!”
Continuous Decline cross-dysfunctional team
Developer: “No point in doing retrospectives, things are always the same”
Tester: “We DON’T HAVE TIME to try new things!”
Business Analyst: “We do it like this, because that’s how we do things here, and that’s it!”
Disintegrated cross-dysfunctional team
Developer: “My code works perfectly, it’s their system that doesn’t work, who cares”
Tester: “We have 100% coverage, all our tests pass and we have no bugs, if the developers of system X are idiots, there is nothing we can do about it”
Customer: “And still, nothing works here…”
Nazi cross dysfunctional team
Developer: “Testers are failed programmers, they shouldn’t be called engineers”
Tester: “Developers are only able to produce bugs, the world would be better with more testers and less developers”
Business Analysts: “I don‘t know why I bother talking to testers and developers, they are total idiots”
Do you recognise your team in one of the categories above? What have you done until now to help your team change? Little? Nothing? But you are still bitching about it, aren’t you?
Remember, you are very powerful and can become the change that you want to see.
| Reference: | Cross-dysfunctional teams from our JCG partner Augusto Evangelisti at the mysoftwarequality blog. |
