Cross functional Managers

When I started reading Re-Imagine by Tom Peters, I thought of a way to build a proper agile team where a person is able to test as well as develop for this team. You can read about the post here – https://bigfatbooksinapage.wordpress.com/2010/12/19/hiring-in-an-agile-environment/ 

The drawback of the idea was that since a person was doing both QA and Dev job, who would be responsible for the person’s performance? How does the appraisal process work for this new hires?

 

The solution was given in a later chapter by Tom Peters himself. The solution is to have Cross functional managers(XF Managers). Why do we need a separate manager for QA,DEv and Doc when the members of the agile team are working together on a single product? Why not make a manager responsible for the entire product?  So, if two agile teams are working on a single product, then there can be only one manager who manages both the teams, and also all the aspects of it( DEV,QA and DOC).

 

Currently a manager has to deal with only one aspect of development. This is true till VP/Director position. However, after this position, the person is responsible for all the aspects of a product. Why keep the complexity of managing different aspects only at such high level? What happens if the company suddenly loses a person in this position? It has to struggle while the new person comes to terms with the complexity of managing cross functional requirements of a product.

 

Ideally, there should be lots of people who are experienced in dealing with cross functional requirements of a team in a company. A manager who has experience in managing a cross functional team would be great for an organisation.

This gives the  company a long endless list of managers who are capable of replacing people one level above themselves.

 

This idea also matches the “leadership pipeline” concept where a company is supposed to have a pipeline of potential leaders to fill up any position.

 

I am sure there will be problems initially. Suppose the current QA manager becomes the XF manager for a team,  he/she might not be able to understand the complexity and give proper guidance in a particular situation to the dev team. Similarly, if the current Dev manager becomes XF manager for a product, he might not give enough importance to QA side of things leading to a lot of dissatisfaction. However, all these problems will be temporary in most cases. If the problems persist,the company will soon find out the capability of managers. Better to find out inability at team manager level rather than at VP level. Right?

 

I know that companies that are already structured along the lines of QA,DEV etc will never restructure according to the idea above. But, I believe,if dont restructure, we will never be able to fully get the benefits of following agile practises.

 

What do you think?