Departments in a company often dislike each other. Situations where “theirs” are opposed to “outsiders” within one company, be it marketing versus bookkeeping, sales versus lawyers, or development versus managers, have buried quite a few projects and undertakings.

The reasons are obvious: different goals and priorities, incomprehensible work processes among colleagues and the complexity of communication. In theory, project management and collaboration systems such as Wrike and our competitors should fix this. And usually this is the case, but sometimes the problem may be too deep to solve it simply by introducing a new service.
')
A full-fledged “treatment” consists of three stages: to change the organization of work in a team, to provide a technical opportunity for collaboration, and the desire of employees to engage in it.

Cross functional teams

Many of the readers (especially among developers) have heard about Agile. A set of techniques, such as Scrum or Kanban, are increasingly adopting software teams or companies as a whole in order to respond more quickly to changing external conditions. Agile approaches provide many interesting innovations in the workflow: constant experiments with immediate verification of results, tightly defined time intervals for working with current tasks (sprints) without adding new ones, etc.

In the context of relations between departments, Agile approaches are also useful, as they provide for a focus on the tight interaction of people working on a common project. It does not matter which department they belong to within the formal structure of the company. Such cross-functional groups have a leader who is responsible for the project, they conduct joint “volunteers”, distribute tasks and constantly communicate with each other. This destroys the “friend-foe” mental pattern in relation to employees in other departments better than any team-building event.

In Wrike, such an organization has been adopted and has been functioning successfully for quite some time. We proceed from the fact that any of the departments (and offices - a geographically distributed structure also creates prerequisites for separation) is useless in itself for business, and we need a common working environment of all departments without exception in order to achieve any goal, whether it be sales growth 20% per month, getting into the top three of the rating of project management systems or about zero staff turnover.

So, to develop a new feature in Wrike, a dedicated project cross-functional team is being created. This includes the product manager, developers, UX specialists, marketer, and sales manager. Partially involved support, designers and other units. Together, they come up with and embody a unified strategy for a new function, which includes the development, promotion and processing of feedback. At the same time, all team members are constantly in contact, and situations can be avoided when in marketing or sales they do not know which merits of the new “feature” are important to emphasize in promotional materials and conversation with the customer.

Technological combination

Fuel to the fire adds to the fact that each department uses its own set of services and applications. And this may concern not only solutions as specific tasks (Marketo in marketing, Zendesk in support), but also quite typical for any needs - instant messengers, task trackers and file storage services. All “sharingi”, access to public folders and channels in this case are limited to employees of one department, and the chance to independently receive such information from a neighboring department colleague is void. That is, the opacity between the teams such automation only exacerbates.

This is one of the reasons why linking services like Zapier are popular in the market, and the quantity and quality of integrations is one of the key factors for companies when choosing corporate systems. When we noticed this, integrations became part of Wrike’s product strategy. Today, the service can serve as an information hub for more than thirty solutions - from Salesforce to Office 365, not counting hundreds of bundles through Zapier.

Plus, the other day, thanks to the integration with Unito, the opportunity to connect Wrike with JIRA appeared. It can be considered an advertisement, but this is perhaps the most important thing that we have ever done to bring employees together in the companies of our clients.

It's no secret that Wrike is preferred by managers, marketing staff and creative teams. The service copes well with monitoring work resources and offers many tools to track the progress of the project. However, in many companies, developers are used to JIRA. They get tickets for detected bugs there, keep their records, distribute those responsible for the tasks - usually all this is not particularly obvious to everyone else in the company. As a result, attempts to clarify the current status of a particular fix can result in hours-long meetings and investigations.

A typical scenario is that developers create a product, fix bugs, and make changes on demand using JIRA. Meanwhile, sales and marketing interact with users and receive feedback, but these teams work in Wrike. With synchronization to both sides, marketers and sales managers will be able to send inquiries and comments to the developers from Wrike, and those in turn will be able to respond to them directly to JIRA.

This is just one example. It is clear that there are much more working situations when the integration of systems of different departments simplifies life.

Pulling together motivators

Organizational restructuring is not always easy. For example, the heads of departments may not like the fact that their employees seem not to be completely altogether - for example, they receive tasks from some incomprehensible people from outside. So, it is worth starting the preparation for the “defragmentation” of the team by convincing key people of the advantages of the new approach in order to avoid opposition and quiet sabotage in the midst of work.

For the successful interaction of the employees themselves also need not only the opportunity, but also the desire. In principle, people often consider their work to be more significant than the work of other professions, and low prioritize (and in severe cases ignore) the requests of colleagues from neighboring departments. The worst thing you can try to correct this attitude is to require more active assistance to each other in the form of an order. This is a sure way to force departments to completely isolate themselves in rival clans.

However, this does not mean that it is impossible to completely influence the attitude of the employees. First, people will share common goals. That is, among the key performance indicators there should be not only personal results, but also general ones (it is important, of course, that these goals should be set not for a tick).

Secondly, the interaction of people from different teams can be encouraged. So, in Wrike for this special bonus system is provided. Once every three months you can thank those colleagues who helped you cope with the work, awarding them a pleasant addition to the salary. Nominating a colleague for a bonus, you need to specify the reason why you want to celebrate his work. This may be a project, a situation or an event that took place over the past quarter. You cannot nominate top managers, directors, direct managers and colleagues from your team, including your scrum team. It is also recommended not to nominate people who nominated you to avoid mutual exchanges.

All together (common projects + tools + motivation) should help to cope with the “separatist” moods in the company. However, there is always room to grow. So if you have your own experience of optimizing work between different teams in the company, we would appreciate a comment.