Multidisciplinary teams are becoming more crucial for the ongoing effectiveness of organisations. The concept had been gaining traction for over 20 years – back in 1996, Prof Susan E Jackson wrote:
“Multidisciplinary teams provide a structure for bringing together employees with the diverse technical backgrounds needed for these tasks. The increasing popularity of team-based organisational structures reflects the widely shared belief that teamwork offers the potential to achieve outcomes that could not be achieved by individuals working in isolation.”
She also noted that the trend is being driven by product-centric methodologies, designed to keep up with evolving market demands. Twenty-four years ago, those words were still quite revolutionary. But as digital technologies became more relevant in establishing business competitiveness, the support for multidisciplinary teams has grown exponentially.
Yet many organisations are discovering that talking about this concept is much simpler than establishing it. Running projects across different silos remains daunting, yet it’s precisely what needs to happen. So where do they go wrong?
“The big stumbling block is really around the way that projects are funded,” said Kirsty Barkhuizen, Chief Digital Officer at Nacelle. “I think most organisations, even though they’re trying to get some of the other structures in place that start working, a lot of companies will get stuck at finance.”
Understanding the multidisciplinary challenge
While a multidisciplinary culture holds great benefits for businesses across all sectors, often companies struggle to adapt to a multidisciplinary approach. Much of the resistance congeals around established cultures and a project-to-project mindset:
“It’s easy and safe for a CFO to understand a start and an end of something that is scoped out and has deliverables upfront, and know exactly where it’s going. And that’s always been the traditional way of doing things. But when you start bringing in multidisciplinary teams, you move from a project-to-project structure to a product structure.”
Projects begin and end, but products can be forever. That may be a tad hyperbolic, but it’s an important point. A product mindset aligns neatly with other business enhancement movements, such as continual improvement and agile development. But Barkhuizen stressed that multidisciplinary teams shouldn’t be confused with those concepts or see them as mutually inclusive.
The point, rather, is to know that a product view allows you to establish better operating models and support structures: “By doing stop-start ad hoc projects, you lift one thing, and then you allow it to die. Then you lift another part of your business and might let it die. Whereas if you follow a product approach, you put teams onto the individual products where they always have support. And you almost move into an opex model, where a specific team keeps on going and building out on a specific product.”
Why embrace multidisciplinary teams?
Conventional wisdom can be dangerous. Just because everyone else is doing something doesn’t mean it’s a good fit for your operations. Yet, when you start looking at the benefits of this approach, the argument for it removes resistance.
“The advantage is that you retain the IP within that product, and within the people of that product. And you’ll see that they start to deliver faster and faster as they get to know the product and the business more.”
Another crucial reason is, as Prof Jackson noted earlier in this article, the creative power of different minds. When you’re trying to solve a problem, there are many different ways to look at it. The best way to do it is to get different points of view on the same problem. Indeed, Barkhuizen has a dislike for the concept of innovation departments. In her experience, real innovation happens inside active teams who come up with interesting ideas and solutions. In other words, multidisciplinary teams are also potential innovation engines.
The keys to unlock this approach lie with operating models. Many projects blow their budgets, because the total cost of ownership rises as different stakeholders add their individual costs, often not exploiting existing synergies within the team. While project leaders are regularly blamed for high project costs, the culprit is more likely how the business operates and funds projects.
There are also other important ingredients, such as providing useful measurements and processes. It’s additionally crucial to have appropriate management practices in place, such as practice leads representing the different disciplines across products.
Nacelle has been using product-focused multidisciplinary teams to great effect, even venturing into creating white-label products for the normally highly bespoke airline industry. The leading minds of previous decades were not wrong: multidisciplinary teams create massive improvements for any organisation. But don’t just shoehorn them into your current operating model. Take a closer look at how such teams function and prepare the ground for them.
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