Tear down the wall!

Too often, I see programmers who just want to program, designers who just want to design, sales people who just want to sell, and researchers who just want to research. I believe that this lack of motivation to cross functional boundaries hinders smooth integrated work processes and provokes the phase-separated workflow much like the waterfall model that we have tried to escape from for so long. Perhaps most important of all, the functional separation hinders the kind of innovation that spurs from having a common tacit understanding across functional groups and having two or more fields being combined and exposed to one another.

Many companies feature this rigid separation of functions as well: they separate functions like programming, design, marketing, sales, and manufacturing – creating walls between groups that have much to learn from- and teach to- one another. In regards to innovation, such separation hinders progress more than it helps as with people who only keep to their own field.

Are we really past the waterfall model? We might be past the most obvious waterfalls within each functional field, but looking at the organization as a whole reveals another picture. Across functionally separated departments, still too many keep to their own turf.

Knowing about the domain, its users, and challenges provides a common shared base for discussion about a problem. It makes everybody involved in a project able to take qualified part of the decision process. If all team members fully understand decisions made throughout a project and their rationale, micro decisions made by individual team members will have a larger certainty of going along the lines of other decisions made and what was intended. Perhaps more important: if a new decision that goes against previous ones needs to be made, it is easier for the individual to evaluate whether it is for the better or worse if he or she understands the rationale behind previous decisions.

Understanding why we are doing what we are doing and where it will take us (the goal), makes it easier for each individual team member to make decisions on his or her own that follow the direction agreed upon by the group. This moves the decision process and workflow from being centralized to being decentralized. It allows more team members to chip in, more angles to be evaluated, and more concerns to be heard.

Each time knowledge or information is handed over across the functional-boundary-wall, it needs to be translated from tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge. When knowledge is translated from field jargon and relations not yet formulated to paper, nuances get lost. There are many shades of meaning, of which only few can be articulated.

So start setting up cross-functional groups with members of several different functional fields on your next project. Let everybody be part of the observation and decision process. I would argue that both clients, developers, designers, researchers should be out doing user observations. It is not enough to just see or hear what people say; you have to be there in person to interpret meaning and discover the underlying motivations and needs for yourself.