Building a Dynamic Team: Embracing a Cross-Functional Workforce

Long gone are the heydays of the one-trick pony. For some time now, it has been necessary to be the master of multiple interdisciplinary trades; to be a Full-Stack Employee. For example, in addition to my deep experience with Service Management (ITSM), early on I found that I needed to round out that expertise with Organizational Change Management (OCM) along with some foreign-language skills. While this is a very strong combination, I am continuing to add to my own personal stack to stay relevant in an ever-changing environment. Here are just some of the reasons it’s so important to constantly upgrade your own skills stack:

• The IT landscape is constantly evolving with new technology and methodologies. People with diverse skills are better able to learn quickly and cope with this and shift from role to role seamlessly.
• It is easier to collaborate across cross-functional teams when we have diverse skill sets.
• It is easier to solve problems when people have diverse skill sets.
• It helps IT employees to be more customer-centric and business focused by understanding customer needs and their wider business context.

At Beyond20, we believe leaders entering the mid-2020s business landscape will need to possess a blend of skills that are not, at least at first blush, obviously related in order to be effective and remain competitive. Among these combinations of skills, this article will focus on these three:

• High-Velocity IT: think of the constellation of skills needed to operate in a Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) environment.
• Workforce and Talent Management: this is a lot more than just HR.
• Finally, as mentioned above, OCM.

With that said, let us now lay the groundwork for these ideas.

What is a Cross-Functional Workforce

This leads us to a couple of terms we should define and clarify:

• Hybrid workforce: Your staff and employees split their working hours between in-office/on-site activities and remote/work-from-home tasks. Just to be clear, while this scenario is likely to be a consideration for the location of where work gets done, it is of little or even no concern as to what will be done. As a result, this use of the word hybrid will not be the focus of this article.
• Cross-Functional workforce: Your staff and employees possess everything from meaningful capabilities to deep expertise in multiple professional areas. In other words, we will be discussing full-stack employees. As the term as used here infers, a cross-functional employee is one who possesses skills and attributes combined from other sources to create something new, in other words cross-function or multi-skilled. This is the interpretation of the term we will be discussing in this article.

So, whether you are on the hiring or the applying side of this equation, the more skills a potential candidate brings to the table, the more valuable they are. This realization directly contributes to one of the major reasons people leave their current positions for new ones: access to more skills and opportunities. While money is, of course, important (coming in at Number 2) Indeed.Com says that Needing more of a challenge is the first-place reason. And a big part of these challenges will be acquiring the skills needed to stay relevant in a complex and changing environment. This will become even more evident when we talk about Workforce and Talent Management; setting up plenty of opportunities for self-improvement and learning additional skills is how to attract the best candidates and keep them from jumping ship.

T-Shaped Professionals

Before I delve into the areas of expertise I see as important for the mid-2020s, let’s talk about what having multiple skills looks like to management, customers, and your colleagues. The term “T-Shaped” is one of the most common ways to describe people with these collections of skillsets. The earliest use of this term I can find dates way back to 1991, but I have read that McKinsey & Company used the term T-Shaped as far back as the ‘80s. While there are several variations on this idea, as we will soon see, we will use T-Shaped not only as a specific example but also as the generic for this entire concept of “usefully-shaped” professionals.

In the past, individuals were typically viewed as either generalists or specialists (I-shaped resources). Today, not only is this viewpoint dangerously outdated for both the organization and the individual, it does not reflect the outcomes that organizations expect and need, and this practice can create resource-related bottlenecks. Modern organizations often look for people to be at least T-shaped while preferring Pi-shaped (π) and comb-shaped (Ш) people. (While Greek speakers may be amused, in English we pronounce the letter π like “pie”.) Let’s review these shapes:

• An I-Shaped employee is the classic single-focus, deep-dive SME (subject matter expert). These people are extremely good at their jobs but when that one skillset they possess becomes obsolete, they will find themselves scrambling for their “next big thing.” The less-than-complimentary description we often hear is that that they are described as being, “an inch wide and a mile deep” in their skillset. It is a great way to start, but these people really must expand their skillsets. In other words, this is the least-desirable of the non-generalist skills configuration.

Figure 1: I-Shaped Individual

• A T-shaped individual is an expert in one area but is also knowledgeable in other areas. For example, a developer or tester who possesses knowledge of accounting. In this example we have a person with one deep-dive specialty (the dark blue vertical bar) but also with some complementary generalist skills across the top (the orange horizontal bar). For the purposes of this discussion, please remember that T-Shaped is not just one specific description, it is also the generic label for all multi-skilled, non-I-shaped people. This can be the jumping off point for professional development – moving out of the I-Shape. As an employee develops that T crossbar, it shows the desire to get involved above and beyond the core specialty and wide the focus.

Figure 2: T-Shaped Individual

• The Pi-shaped (Greek letter π) individual is an expert in at least two areas and knowledgeable in other areas. For example, someone who can both design and develop but also possesses good testing skills. Like with the T-Shape, cross bar at the top symbolizes some knowledge and understanding tying these deep skillsets together but not profound expertise. A great example here would be an employee whose specialty is ITSM but who adds deep expertise in project management and links that all together with knowledge in ITIL 4. Now we see someone who has put in the hard work to specialize in multiple fields and tie those together with a common skill.

Figure 3: Pi-Shaped Individual

• A comb-shaped individual is an expert in at least domains and has considerable knowledge in other areas. With the Comb-Shape, notice that the deep skillsets are tied together with a profound understanding, undergirding them all. The example I like to use are those unicorns out there with both an MBA and an MIS degrees joined together with years of C-level management experience.

Figure 4: Comb-Shaped Individual

In the past, Pi-shaped individuals were usually senior staff who had developed their skills over time by working in different domains. However, this has changed: new hires may be skilled in multiple areas but not be highly specialized in any. Many individuals take a proactive approach to developing their skills and knowledge. T-shaped individuals tend to be inquisitive; they like to learn new skills and will acquire them whenever opportunity allows.

Although a clear focus on one competency creates deeper understanding, it can be dangerous to have only one area of expertise. This is because, in the rapidly evolving technology industry, an individual may find that their area of expertise is no longer relevant.

Our Big Three Skills:

Let’s take a quick look under the hood of these three big skills that we want to utilize to create cross-functional employees.

HVIT Skills

Now let’s take some highly skilled I-shaped people, each with an impressive history in software development or cloud computing and hybridize them. (If only Mary Shelley had written a workplace comedy instead of a horror novel, I could have called them but that just will not work here.) Especially for those starting now, it is increasingly unlikely that any of these professionals will ever work in anything other than an Agile or DevOps-type environment. Think of DevOps as the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. More and more they will be engaged in a high-velocity IT (HVIT) CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery) environment. CI/CD — the combination of continuous integration and continuous delivery — is an essential part of DevOps and any modern software development practice. A purpose-built CI/CD platform can maximize development time by improving an organization’s productivity, increasing efficiency, and streamlining workflows through built-in automation, continuous testing, and collaboration. HVIT can be seen as the application of digital technology for significant business enablement, where time to market, time to customer, time to change, and speed in general are crucial. High velocity is not restricted to fast development; it is required throughout the service value chain, from innovation at the start, through development and operations, to the actual realization of value.

As if it ever was supposed to work like this, nobody’s skillset can remain viable in isolation today. More than 10 years ago, Spotify pioneered their approach scaling Agile decked out with tribes, squads, chapters and guilds (and they have moved on beyond this model in the years since). The gist of their organizational work was to create multi-disciplinary teams (squads) that coordinated their work with other squads forming tribes. Each tribe focuses on a related area, service or product and consists of multiple squads with each squad focusing on the details of their deliverables. Multiple tribes allow Spotify to attack these products or services simultaneously. Since everyone is working towards a common enterprise goal, these tribes cannot be fully autonomous. A way to glue these tribes together was to form chapters: similar skillsets across the squads within a given tribe. For example, all of the cloud computing specialists, one in each of our, let’s say four, squads communicate and work together to keep pace with each other within their tribe. Guilds in this model serve as communities of interest that span the tribes. With this example, I want to show the importance of creating environments that allow teams to work autonomously without sacrificing coordination and communication. The natural next step is to bring on team members with multiple skillsets themselves and/or to train up and expand your staff’s existing skills.

Figure 5: HVIT Skills

What your enterprise really needs are teams consisting of people with multiple skillsets, cross training and possessing the hunger to learn new skills.

Workforce and Talent Management

A hundred years ago, the newly-formed discipline of Human Resources (HR) served as a purely administrative function. But as management has come to understand the criticality of people in and to the organization, as more than simply head count, HR has evolved profoundly. Workforce and Talent Management is the acknowledgement and manifestation of this evolution. Even down to the team level, it is important to have this mentality of managing a talented workforce, to help them to find ways to expand and grow all while meeting enterprise goals and objectives, while leaving the HR aspects of this to the HR team.

Earlier in this article we discussed the various forms of T-Shaped employees. What we did not talk about was how to not just find and attract these valuable people, but how to retain them once they are here. How will we help them to plan their own career trajectories with meaningful and rewarding employment, guided and directed by the organization’s mission, strategy, culture, and resources all while focusing on the jobs to be done. This is where Workforce and Talent Management comes into play.

Workforce and Talent Management is one of the new practices that ITIL 4 identified and brought into the fold back in 2019 upon release of the new framework. I like to think of it as HR raised to a power of 10 – it does everything that HR does plus so much more. The ITIL 4 Practice Guide describes the purpose of Work Force/ Talent Management as ensuring “that the organization has the right people, with the appropriate skills & knowledge, in the correct roles to support its business objectives. The practice covers a broad set of activities focused on successfully engaging with the organization’s employees and people resources including: planning, recruitment, onboarding, learning and development, performance measurement, and succession planning.” To be effective, the practice needs to understand that:

• Organizations are open systems, their relationships with other systems cannot be ignored.
• An organization’s strategies continually evolve, so should the HR strategy.
• Digital technologies change the way work and the skills that organizations need.
• Decisions should be driven by principles, not rules.
• Organizations should recognize and embrace complexity and complexity-driven heuristics.
• Organizational agility, adaptability, and efficiency should be enabled by the organizational structure and management practices.
• Workforce and Talent Management is the responsibility of every team, manager, and leader in the organization, not only HR professionals.

Injecting this focus on Workforce and Talent Management into the teams is how we can empower our employees to become captains of their own careers while meeting the organization’s needs now and into the future. By definition, HVIT environments are disruptive and, at times, chaotic. Only by leading teams with the Workforce and Talent Management mindset will we attract, keep, and cultivate the very best and brightest.

Organizational Change Management (OCM)

ITIL 4 defines the purpose of OCM is to ensure that changes in an organization are implemented smoothly and successfully, and that lasting benefits are achieved by managing the human aspects of the changes. Like Workforce and Talent Management, OCM was officially inducted into the ITIL 4 family with the 2019 rollout. Workforce and Talent Management and OCM can, in many ways, be seen as two sides of the same coin. That coin being how to manage and thrive within chaotic levels of change and disruption. Workforce and Talent Management helps us with the internals of our own teams. OCM will help us deal with the external disruptions that our changes impose on the larger organization. Again, this does not mean that all team members must become OCM specialists but rather that consideration for the ultimate stakeholders are baked into the projects. When OCM staff are part of the team, this mindset will become just part of the baseline.

I wish I could find who said this, but even without attribution, the quote is fantastic: “While project management prepares the solution for the organization, OCM prepares the organization for the solution.” All of this work that we are doing to products, services, infrastructure and enterprise at large will have substantial impacts well beyond those of us in IT. There is a lot of distance between “Build it and they will come” and “You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink”. OCM is there to make your stakeholders thirsty for your solutions.

One of the many traps of group think is the mistaken belief that the value of your team’s particular solution is so self-evident that no one in their right mind could ever possibly resist let alone refuse. I have seen too many otherwise brilliant ITSM solutions crash into the rocks because we did not bring the people along for the ride; we did not prepare the organization for the solution and so it failed. Hence, my interest in OCM came out of an abundance of self-preservation.

All together now

If you have not yet noticed, the central message of the article is how to become a change wrangler. How do you use the weight of change against itself to propel your organization forward – how do you use jujitsu to sustain change in your organization? Where are all of my Pi and Comb-shaped employees? Let’s now concretize some of these disparate topics.

Think about process design. In the bad old days, an isolated expert (or team of experts) sat in a closed room and thought about the best way to do something. They drew some pretty pictures in Visio and created elegant swim-lane diagrams that solved all of our problems. Right?

This mindset alone was enough to force me to dive deeply into OCM years ago. Prior to that, we invariably got it wrong for the same constellation of reasons:

• We were not agile enough to deal with the needs of the organization in real time, so our designs arrived outdated and dead on arrival.
• We usually lacked the insight and expertise of the “doers,” assuming that we knew better. If we did a better job at refreshing our skills and cross training for the knowledge we lacked we could have made better, more holistic designs.
• What about all of the other stakeholders? When we make elemental changes to the way people work we are threatening their very livelihoods. When we re-design processes, we are challenging the way people understand their jobs. If we cannot build the excitement for the change, demonstrate how and why they will benefit and convert this into the New Normal, we can fail at multiple levels.

We did not achieve the full quotient of success because we were only covering 120° of their circle of needs instead of the full 360. As we brought in the other 2/3s of the skillsets, OCM and Workforce and Talent Management (even though we did not call it that at the time) our success dramatically improved. In all honesty, I was bringing at best 240° degree coverage with the technical expertise and OCM. It has taken me until relatively recently to comprehend the value of giving teams the same considered treatments as the other stakeholders, or at best, treating the teams as just another OCM constituency.

Now, imagine taking this 360° approach to other projects, for example a ServiceNow implementation. Building out workflows becomes a far more sophisticated and nuanced activity once we consider these three areas of concentration. Consider how much better your portal design and your service catalog will be when you view them from these three vantage points:

• Technology
• Teams
• Stakeholders

This same triple-threat can be applied to remote consulting. In all probability, good consultants should be already bringing the HVIT expertise to the game as table stakes. But their real value will be coming from their ability leverage Workforce and Talent Management to your teams while applying good OCM practice to all other impacted stakeholders. Addressing your organization’s needs with this 360° approach is the real mark of leadership and expertise. ITIL 4 address this holistic approach to our products and services with the 4 Dimensions of Service Management.

Figure 6: Four Dimensions of Service Management

Now imagine injecting this mindset into your team, making these ideas pervasive. Converting to this way of thinking may be challenging. And you will most likely find that the holistic process takes longer but this really becomes the choice between pay me now or pay me later. Front loading the effort will make for efficient development and more effective delivery. I had this hilarious client who told me, with a straight face, “You know, we may not have time to do it right, but we will always find time to do it again.” Now with HVIT and the CI/CD pipeline in constant flow, there is no more do-it-again time left. We have to do it right the first time.

Leaders at every level will find their leadership skills honed and tested in the forge of change. Hire and promote for the Pi and Comb-shaped staff you need. If you can facilitate the change coming in high-velocity environments, coming for your teams, coming for your enterprise, you are not just any leader, you are a thought leader. By making sure that this is how your leaders and your teams orient themselves, you will be leading your organization in the way it thinks.