Cross-Functional Teams
Cross-Functional Teams are characterized by diversity in participants’ functions, complex and efficient reporting systems, and more efficient time management. These teams are built of members that specialize in different disciplines and, regarding their specialization, provide different functions in the team, yet the actions of every specialist are dedicated to reaching one common goal. Important to mention that there is an issue that it causes – it is difficult to build a unified management for these teams. It is rare to see a leader in them. Yet, there is a solution – some organizations attach such teams to multiple managers within an organization, depending on the specializations adopted by the members of a team.
Cross-Functional Teams are especially beneficial in terms of working on projects. The diversity that is present in such teams allows them to gather all the resources needed to complete a project in one place, making them communicate and work with each other, which eventually gives better performance. CFTs are able to analyze a wider range of information to be considered when planning a project, which helps them consider more factors and make better decisions. Not only the information gained by such teams is wider, but it is also deeper and more precise.
Strategy Alignment
Strategy Alignment is a set of methods and mechanisms that allows an organization better understand the correlation between its different parts, processes, and strategies. Understanding this helps an organization build a better infrastructure with efficient relationships between different parts of it.
Strategy Alignment helps an organization reach a common goal. The management, the employees, the stakeholders – all get aligned to the common purpose of the organization. This means that whatever tasks they are completing in the organization, they always have to consider the general purpose of their job.
For Nissan, this method would be very useful as they were trying to reach similar goals with Cogent. Strategy Alignment also helps to organize and optimize the relationships between different parts of the company, or as in the case with Nissan, different parties from different organizations.
Key Learning Points
Using Cogent results in better time and finance management as issues are easier to be resolved in the pre-development stage.
Cogent helps to make communication between parties that affect the development of a product improve, which gives a lot of benefits.
When suppliers are aligned with the processes of other parties, it helps reduce the number of changes needed to implement, increases the quality, and the development becomes cheaper.
Helps evaluate suppliers in terms of what they are capable of (QCDDM). Evaluating suppliers helps to provide the suppliers with the support they need and helps them understand if they are not capable of meeting the requirements.
Advantages of building Cross-Functional Teams in terms of economy of resources and time.
Advantages of Strategy And Process Alignment in terms of optimization of the infrastructure of companies or cooperating parties.
Future Recommendations
Cogent should be modified based on the new conditions, and also, it could be much more detailed in terms of work with suppliers, getting more engaged in their internal processes.
Different strategies should be adopted as one could be used in a specific situation and could be unusable in the other one; therefore, having various methods in the arsenal is the key to performance.
Technological guidance and assistance between parties would enhance the processes of developing and manufacturing products. If suppliers had a better understanding of the manufacturing processes at Nissan, they would be able to provide supplies of higher quality, considering the technological aspects.
References
Anon. (1999) Nissan’s cogent: the co-development regeneration tool. [DVD]
Simsarian Webber, S. (2002). Leadership and trust facilitating cross‐functional team success. Journal of Management Development, 21(3), 201–214.
Morrison, E.D., Ghose, A.K., Dam, H.K., Hinge, K.G., Hoesch-Klohe, K. (2012). Strategic Alignment of Business Processes. In: , et al. Service-Oriented Computing – ICSOC 2011 Workshops. ICSOC 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7221. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.