Alan Baljeu, a contributor to the everydayAgile@yahoogroups.com e-mail list quotes author Stephen Armstrong as follows: "About 80 percent of the problems I face in a change management project come from engineers. They can pose a real challenge when an organization is committed to finding new and better ways to do things."
Alan adds that the kind of change, of which Armstrong speaks, is to move engineers out of silos and into cross-discipline or cross-functional teams.
Alan finishes by asking for reactions to Armstrong's statements.
Thank you, Alan, for this bit of information. Indeed, I do have a reaction to Armstrong's statements.
Engineers tend to speak their minds. If they feel that they're being asked to do something that doesn't make sense to them, they tend to speak up about the situation. This is particularly true if they're speaking to a consultant, who has no authority within their companies and therefore can't do anything to them. However, the tendency of engineers to speak their minds is not the real problem, neither for the engineers nor for the companies for which they work. The real problem is considerably more serious.
The notion of cross-functional teams, also known as integrated product teams (IPTs), has been around for decades. Management teams have struggled to achieve this enlightened state of organizational awareness ever since the matrix-mismanagement pandemic of the 1970s debilitated knowledge-work companies across the globe. If engineers appear to resist a move toward this enlightened state, they do so probably for two reasons: a) They've suffered adverse consequences from this sort of change in the past, and b) they've seen this sort of change fail in the past.
Do not infer that engineers think highly of the silo-structure or that they believe cross-functional teams to be ineffective. We do not (yes, I'm an engineer too). However, if working in cross-functional teams means that already busy engineers have to take on additional work and attend additional meetings, on top of the numerous meetings and considerable work that their respective silos require of them already, then yes, expect resistance to this and to all equally brilliant suggestions.
Further, if a company's earlier two or three attempts to utilize cross-functional teams didn't last more than a handful of months, why should anyone expect yet another attempt to succeed?
Attempts to utilize cross-functional teams are futile, for most companies. They are Band-Aids, intended to overcome the gross deficiencies of the silo-structure, which impedes the performance of the vast majority of the companies of our time.
A company's reporting structure determines the manner in which managers and workers throughout the company interact with one another. Therefore, it defines the primary systems of the company, and it sets the level of performance of which the primary systems are capable.
If Armstrong's clients want greater performance than the primary systems of their silo-companies provide, they need to do something more substantive than merely applying a few cross-functional Band-Aids. They need to do two things:
- Design high-performance primary systems.
- Design a supporting structure. That is. Design a reporting structure that supports and enables high-performance primary systems rather than impeding these.
