Stop me if you’ve heard this one before… An organization decides to align its operation around business products. It organizes all of its product development into cross-functional teams with each team focused exclusively on one product. The business likes the focus, but soon people start to complain. Functional experts feel isolated and aren’t able to tap into their technical peers who are now isolated in other teams. Common practices and standards become difficult. Functional managers feel left out, as they don’t have much of a role now that their people are permanently assigned to specific business units and are dedicated members of a cross-functional team. Overall, the organization certainly sees advantages to the re-alignment, but they can’t help but feel they are neglecting their institutional knowledge and have reduced some of their technical capacity to solve problems. You might think I’m talking about an Agile development team, but actually I’m talking about Chrysler in the 1990′s when they re-organized their engineering around auto lines. (Wenger et al, Cultivating Communities of Practice 1)
Indeed, the challenges that agile organizations have been facing as they embrace team centric work have actually been confronted by numerous organizations prior to Agile. Automobile companies, professional consultancies, oil companies, and even the world bank have encountered this challenge where their technical experts have become ensconced in cross-functional project silos. Looking at how these organizations have addressed this challenge offers us some interesting insights. The successful organizations didn’t try to bolster their functional silos or build standards groups, but rather they embraced a more informal and organic model for sharing knowledge, solving problems and even making strategic investments: communities of practice.
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