His among his own: How to love a neighbor from a neighboring department



    Departments in the company often do not like each other. Situations when “friends” are confronted by “strangers” within the same company, be it marketing against accounting, sales against lawyers or development against managers, have buried many projects and undertakings.

    The reasons are obvious: different goals and priorities, incomprehensible workflows among colleagues and the complexity of communication. In theory, project management and collaboration systems such as Wrike and our competitors should fix this. And usually it happens, but sometimes the problem can be too deep to be solved by simply introducing a new service.

    A full-fledged “treatment” consists of three stages: changing the organization of work in a team, providing a technical opportunity for collaboration and the desire of employees to do it.


    Cross-functional teams


    Many readers (especially among developers) have heard of Agile. A set of techniques, such as Scrum or Kanban, is increasingly being adopted by software teams or entire companies in order to respond more quickly to changing environmental conditions. Agile approaches provide many interesting innovations in the workflow: constant experiments with immediate verification of results, hard-set time intervals for working with current tasks (sprints) without adding new ones, etc.

    In the context of relations between departments, Agile approaches are also useful, since they provide a focus on the close interaction of people working on a common project. It doesn’t matter which department they belong to within the formal structure of the company. Such cross-functional groups have a leader who is responsible for the project, they conduct joint “flies”, distribute tasks and constantly communicate with each other. This destroys the mental template “friend or foe” in relation to employees of other departments better than any team building event.

    In Wrike, such an organization has been adopted and has been successfully operating for quite some time. We proceed from the fact that any of the departments (and offices - a geographically distributed structure also creates the preconditions for separation) is in itself useless for business, and we need a common working environment for all departments without exception in order to achieve any goal, be it sales growth 20% per month, getting into the "top three" rating of project management systems or about zero staff turnover.

    So, to develop a new feature in Wrike, a cross-functional team dedicated to the project is created. This includes a product manager, developers, UX specialists, a marketer, and a sales manager. Partially involved support, designers and other units. Together, they come up with and implement a single strategy for a new function that includes development, market promotion and feedback processing. Moreover, all team members are constantly in contact, and you can avoid situations where in marketing or sales they do not know what advantages of the new “feature” it is important to emphasize in promotional materials and in a conversation with a client.

    Tech bundle




    The fact that each department uses its own set of services and applications adds fuel to the fire. Moreover, this may concern not only solutions as specific tasks (Marketo in marketing, Zendesk in support), but also quite typical for any needs - instant messengers, task trackers and file storage services. All "sharinga", access to shared folders and channels in this case are limited to employees of one unit, and the chance to independently obtain such information by a colleague from a neighboring department is negligible. That is, the opacity between teams, such automation only exacerbates.

    This is one of the reasons for the popularity of such connecting services on the market as Zapier, and the quantity and quality of integration is one of the key factors for companies when choosing enterprise systems. When we noticed this, integration became part of Wrike's product strategy. Today, the service can serve as an information hub for thirty-odd solutions - from Salesforce to Office 365, not counting hundreds of bundles through Zapier.

    Plus, the other day, thanks to integration with Unito, it became possible to connect Wrike with JIRA. This may be considered an advertisement, but this is perhaps the most important of what we have ever done to bring our employees closer together in our clients' companies.

    It's no secret that Wrike is preferred by managers, marketing and creative teams. The service does a good job of monitoring work resources and offers many tools to track the progress of a project. However, in many companies, developers are used to JIRA. They start tickets for detected bugs there, keep track of them, distribute those responsible for the tasks - usually all this is not very obvious to everyone else in the company. As a result, attempts to find out the current status of a particular fix can result in hours-long meetings and investigations.

    A typical scenario is that developers create a product, fix bugs and make changes on request using JIRA. Meanwhile, sales and marketing interact with users and get feedback, but these teams work at Wrike. With synchronization in both directions, marketers and sales managers will be able to send requests and comments to Wrike developers, and those in turn will be able to answer them directly in JIRA.

    This is just one example. It is clear that there are much more working situations when the integration of systems of different departments simplifies life.

    Bringing together motivators




    Organizational restructuring is not always easy. For example, department heads may not like that their employees seem to be already not quite theirs - for example, they receive tasks from some strange people from the outside. So, it’s worth starting the preparation for the “defragmentation” of the team by convincing key people in the advantages of the new approach to avoid opposition and quiet sabotage in the midst of work.

    For the successful interaction of the employees themselves, they also need not only opportunity, but also desire. People, in principle, often consider their work more significant than the work of other professions, and low prioritize (and in severe cases ignore) requests from colleagues from neighboring departments. The worst thing you can try to fix this attitude is to demand more active help to each other in an orderly manner. This is a surefire way to force divisions to finally separate themselves from warring clans.

    However, this does not mean that it is impossible to influence the attitude of employees at all. First, people share common goals. That is, among key performance indicators, there should be not only personal results, but also general ones (it is important, of course, to ensure that these goals are not set off).

    Secondly, the interaction of people from different teams can be encouraged. So, in Wrike, a special bonus system is provided for this. Once every three months, you can thank those colleagues who helped you do your job, giving them a pleasant addition to your salary. When nominating a colleague for a bonus, you need to specify the reason why you want to note his work. This may be a project, situation or event that took place over the past quarter. You cannot nominate top managers, directors, direct managers and colleagues from your team, including your scrum team. It is also recommended not to nominate the people who nominated you in order to avoid mutual exchange.

    All together (common projects + tools + motivation) should help to cope with the “separatist” moods in the company. However, there is always room to grow. So if you have your own experience optimizing the work between different teams in the company, we will be grateful for the comment.

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