In my last blog I discussed how in an Agile team “we vs they” (between developers and testers) phenomena can severly damage team dynamics. The idea is – it doesn’t work when two links of a chain consider them isolated and independent links. As soon as they think so, they are really not working towards one common goal.
Today I had a similar discussion with one of my friends on the dynamics of Sales and Delivery teams in a software development company. For software delivery (implementation) team, Sales is like a foreign word sometimes. For them Sales people must be working in their own islands. Similarly Sales team in itself might be very cohesive team but they again might be living in their own world. For them Sales in itself can be an individual topic which works based on the relationships, links etc rather than with the help of any technical expertise.
In real world though, if Sales and Delivery teams don’t interact much, they again are not working towards a common goal. organizational success. Delivery or Technology team keeps on innovating new things in terms of project execution, engineering practices or new technologies. So technology team in itself may have a very good foundation and implementation and may be proud on what they can offer to the customer, but unless Sales team knows it, they wont sell it. These days, as software services world is coming towards its saturation based on market competition and enhanced customer education, working on default old formula doesn’t work. You need to be different in a crowd of so many other companies. In this context, if these two teams dont talk to each other, they are walking fast towards doom.
Based on its limited knowledge of technology world, Sales would try to articulate stuff which they have very less clue about. However on the other hand in case there is proper interfacing between Sales and Technology team and they have consistent and frequent conversation between them, Technology people can pitch in where they are required to put their expertise in front of the customer.
It’s evident from this example that the locking between two links is utmost important. They need to work as one team and need to complement each other. Instead of working in their shells and comforting their false egos, it’s important to collaborate with open minds and work towards common goal.
As you see the fundamental concept of work between different teams (links) is almost similar. It turns out as a pattern which works for all multi-functional teams who are working towards one common goals.
The pattern is all about renouncing the self-ego of individual link and work in collaborative and complementary mode to achieve common goals.
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