Open Space Notes for Specialty vs. Cross-functional Teams (Banda Sea 1)
- Explained situation of a company that has mostly specialty teams because they have a high number of teams over a high number of divisions and end up doing the different products across the division’s but putting the products together provides value.
- Person said work from VMWare and they also have very complex
- How reduce cycle team
- Have plane mechanic and car mechanics and rather then bring plane mechanics over to work on cars was not worth it – made decision that time is money
- Person had 24 teams – how resolve dependencies?
- Speciality vs. Cross-functional
- Where is your most communication taking place? More communication surrounding building the product or more communication needed
- Communication, dependencies and inter-dependencies
- Bring into a single team that have strong communication lines
- Cannot get rid of cross-team communication – but want to minimize as much as possible with team structure
- Generalized specialists wanted – will teams take time to take the one step back to take two steps forward in future
- Don’t want to split a person across teams if at all possible (anything less than 50% is red flag)
- Spotify video on dividing dependencies
Conclusion: If you have multiple component (specialized) team, working together then try to keep objective of minimizing dependencies between team. Either by minimal team restructuring or refactoring the component architecture.