🖤 Open Works #022 How To Analyse Cross Functional Collaboration Challenges

Welcome to Open Works. Every edition we solve a ‘people and culture’ problem crowd-sourced from the Open Org Community of 380+ Startup and Scale-up People Leaders.

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🎉 Edition 20: Everything we built in 2024 – our top open source resources for people leaders, downloaded 800k+.

🎯 Edition 16: Building my people strategy from scratch! SOS – a principle driven framework to building your startup’s people strategy.

💰️ Edition 17: How to share financials without stressing your team or your CEO – a guide to incrementally improving financial literacy and transparency.

💭 This Week’s People Problem

🖤 Our Take on How You Solve It

🏃 TL;DR

Right people in the room + a framework that looks across people, process and tools = how you win.

1️⃣ Map out high-level business processes and identify strengths, weaknesses, and gaps.
2️⃣ Deep-dive into the customer journey to spotlight critical moments of truth.
3️⃣ Use value stream mapping and process tools to analyse cross-functional handoffs.
4️⃣ Co-create solutions with the teams involved and build a roadmap to fix key issues.

Let’s break it down. 👇

🚀 Step 1: Start With a High-Level Business Map

• Bring together a cross-functional group of 8-10 key reps (e.g., heads of marketing, sales, engineering, and CX, plus 1-2 team members from each).

• Build a high-level map of the business line or product that shows:

  • Flow of work across teams.

  • Flow of value to customers.

  • Who owns what and where handoffs occur.

• Use this map as a heat-map to identify strong areas and gaps tied to strategic goals like speed, revenue, cost, or retention.

🌟 Step 2: Deep-Dive Into the Customer Journey

• Create a customer journey map to align on the ‘as-is’ experience. Include:

  • What they’re doing, thinking, feeling, and saying.

  • Key moments of truth critical to activation, engagement, or retention.

• Heat-map this journey to highlight what’s working and what’s not, and which team(s) owns that.

• Focus on “moments of truth” that impact the customer experience.

🛠️ Step 3: Use Tools To Map Processes and Handoffs

Combine business process mapping and value stream mapping to create a more detailed view:

• Break down key activities by team (e.g., “Marketing generates lead,” “Sales qualifies lead”).

• 🚥 Measure the speed and quality of handoffs between teams:

  • How long does the handoff take?

  • Is it healthy, needs improvement, or a real problem (cough, dumpster fire, cough, cough…)? (Use a simple red-amber-green status to visualise).

• Include tools and tech used during each step to identify inefficiencies (e.g., poorly configured CRM, manual data entry).

🔍 Step 4: Dig Into Root Causes

For each issue (especially the “red” handoffs), diagnose whether it’s due to:

• People: Skills gaps, collaboration challenges.

• Process: Overly complex, unclear, or missing steps.

• Tools: Ineffective or misconfigured tech.

🛤️ Step 5: Co-Create Solutions and Build a Roadmap

• Split into smaller groups with the most relevant teams to brainstorm solutions against the problem areas.

• Co-create fixes for each issue and align them with business priorities.

• Consolidate solutions into an actionable roadmap for improvement. Agree ownership and commitments. Communicate it.

✅ Key Outcomes

• Shared Understanding: Build alignment across teams by mapping workflows and customer journeys, making silos and inefficiencies visible.

• Actionable Insights: Identify strengths, weaknesses, and gaps in processes and handoffs that directly impact business outcomes.

• Root Cause Analysis: Pinpoint whether challenges stem from people, processes, or tools—and focus improvement efforts where they’ll have the most impact.

• Aligned Solutions: Co-create practical, team-driven solutions and turn them into a prioritised roadmap for scalable growth and better decision-making.

📚️ Good reads relating to this problem…

📘 Jeff Patton’s Story Mapping One Pager

📘 Value Stream Mapping [Atlassian guide]

📘 Business Process Design [userPilot]

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🖤 John & Adam

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John & Adam

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