Blog series – Training cross-functional teams

Today organizations strive to work according to the Agile mindset. They use Scrum or Kanban or DevOps or SAFe® or any other way of IT delivery that we refer to as “High-performance IT delivery”.

In high-performance IT delivery, people are organized in cross-functional teams that together take responsibility to deliver the right IT support for business processes, with the right quality level to deliver business value to their customers.

A team member working in a cross-functional team requires additional skills and capabilities compared to working in traditional “siloed” teams.

In this series of blogs, we will elaborate on a wide variety of aspects related to the training of people in cross-functional teams.

1. How to train cross-functional teams
2. How to be a good cross-functional team member
3. Does every team member need coding skills?
4. Five different ways to train a cross-functional team member
5. Challenges of agile at scale
6. Do cross-functional team members need business knowledge?
7. What’s the difference between training on-line and on-site?
8. Solutions to the testing challenges when working agile at scale
9. Solutions to the challenges when working agile at scale – part 2
10. Three tips when working with teams with people from different backgrounds
11. Sustainability from a social perspective
12. Three tips when working agile at scale
13. Today’s teams need Roles, not Functions
14. How to train team members about business knowledge

If you have any ideas or requests, please let us know, this series is a work in progress, so your contribution is highly valued!

Authors:

Eva Holmquist – Eva Holmquist has more than twenty-eight years of professional IT experience, working as a programmer, project manager and at every level of the testing hierarchy from a tester through test manager. She has also worked with test process improvements and in test education as a teacher and with the development of courses including a Swedish ISTQB Foundation certification course. Author of the book ”Praktisk mjukvarutestning” (Software Testing in Practice) as well as science fiction and fantasy novels. Eva works as a Senior Test Specialist at Sogeti helping clients improve their testing practices using her broad experience in system development, process improvements, and education. She is a frequent speaker and has during the last year held presentations about agile testing, DevOps and quality assurance, cognitive quality assurance and bias in artificial intelligence.

Rik Marselis – Rik Marselis is the principal quality consultant at Sogeti in the Netherlands. He has assisted many organizations in improving their IT processes, establishing their quality & testing approach, setting up their quality & test organization, and acted as a quality coach, QA consultant, test manager and quality supervisor. Rik uses his more than 40 years of experience in systems development and quality and testing to bring fit-for-purpose solutions to our clients. Rik has contributed to over 20 books on quality and testing, of which 6 as the main author. His most recent book in the TMAP body of knowledge is “Quality for DevOps teams”. Rik is a much-appreciated keynote speaker and workshop host at conferences.