The full power of applying agile frameworks in the context of a digital transformation is unleashed when team members begin to act beyond their own sphere of expertise. Interfaces become more efficient, misunderstandings are prevented and the risk of possible personnel failures is reduced, since knowledge is no longer hoarded in individual heads.
However, the cultural shift away from silos to cross-functional teams usually proves to be a difficult undertaking. Even if the team combines all the necessary expertise, individual team members find it difficult to open up to the topics of their colleagues and to take on tasks outside their area of expertise. Sentences such as “There is no task for me on the task board” or “I have to wait until my colleague is back from vacation” are often heard. However, this is necessary to form an actual T-shaped team.
The term “T-shaped” is a metaphor in which the vertical line of the T represents a team member’s expertise, whereas the horizontal line represents knowledge outside of one’s area of expertise. Accordingly, in a cross-functional team, team members should not only be interdisciplinary, but have an understanding and implementation expertise for the other disciplines represented.
With their simulation X-Team Silos Game, Mia Kolmodin and Per Lundholm have developed a playful way to interactively convey the added value of cross-functional teams. In the process, the different team members take on different roles and, in a first round, are only allowed to lay work packages of their own color in the form of Lego bricks. Since this does not lead to a desirable result in the time available, the competences are distributed in the team so that each team member may lay Lego bricks of different colors.
This simple gameplay vividly demonstrates that a team’s potential can only be fully exploited if the team members can take on tasks from other specialist areas in addition to their expert knowledge, so that dependencies and waiting times can be reduced.
