There is a new buzzword out there - 'cross-functional team'. So, what does that mean? Essentially, what we're talking about here is where the I.T. professionals in an agile team are joined with the business professionals or the actual users of the application so that there is a very strong sense of communication between the users and the developers during each single short sprint of 2 to 3 weeks.
So, whatever is produced at any moment in time is actually a result of the minds of the I.T. developers and the business users. This obviously produces the best results. Now it's strange because here what's happening is that people are taking a fancy word, cross-functional teams and doing something that's actually with professional development company, it's been happening for a long time. And this is whereby the users, the actual end users are very closely related and communicate with the actual developers themselves.
What Are Cross-Functional Teams from Point100 on Vimeo.
We said earlier that cross-functional teams are essentially teams where the I.T. professionals and the professional users are closely intertwined and working very closely with each other during the development process. This is something that we have been doing at Point100 for many, many years. And the reason why it works and why the successful project is so much more improved and so much better when the users are closely related to the developers, is quite simply this. That trying to work out precisely what an application or a new program should do is actually quite difficult.
You might have 80% of the ideas in your head and able to write that down, but 20% of ideas, it's very difficult the level of detail to capture those final 20% is quite difficult. And that final 20% can represent perhaps 80% of the functionality of your programme. So therefore, the only way to really capture everything is to work using the agile methodology where you have a 2 to 3 week sprint so every three weeks, you're producing something for the application. And during those three weeks, the users and the developers are working so closely together they can keep in touch and talk and actually convey the requirements for the application.
Why Cross-Functional Teams Are Successful from Point100 on Vimeo.
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