“The best teamwork comes from men who are working independently toward one goal in unison.” – James Cash Penney
The idea of collective performance has acquired significant currency in the domain of organizational dynamics in the modern world. Organizations the world over are investing in this metric in pursuit of various objectives – such as better performance in markets, generating greater returns for stakeholders, improving bottom-line performance, elevating the quality of products and services, among others. However, observers have stated on the record that “collaboration across departments has become even more significant and arduous after the outbreak of coronavirus pandemic and digital transformation.”
Therefore, the matter of interdepartmental coordination assumes a degree of urgency and therefore, it would be beneficial to explore and ideate on the various aspects of interdepartmental coordination through the agency of connected diagrams, such as flowcharts. These illustrations serve as analytical constructs that promote the use of the imagination in fashioning the outlines of modern strategy. When allied with lines of original thought, these illustrations could assist organizations to frame and design unique versions of strategy that boost collaboration and coordination.
- Re-Thinking the ‘Same Page’
Individual employees that populate teams across organizations must remain on the proverbial same page – this could act as a primary first step toward achieving interdepartmental coordination. Therefore, leaders of organizations may design editions of connected diagrams featuring the entire expanse of an organizational vision. This form of visual illustration encourages associates and employees to refresh their understanding of team objectives, locate their presence in collaborative ventures, and delineate how these relate to the grand vision espoused by their employers. Flowcharts can assist organizations to develop the moving parts of strategy – ones that empower organizations to build greater traction in terms of harnessing teams to perform toward common objectives.
- Primacy of Good Strategy
“Interdepartmental reviews, formal check-ins, and acts of establishing informal relationships among team members” can provide significant thrust to the idea of boosting interdepartmental coordination. Readers may view this matrix of actions as building blocks of strategy that govern the long-term performance of organizations. For instance, teams may meet informal environments to share notes on projects and subsequently devise smarter methods to boost interdepartmental coordination. We could amplify this stance to include rotations, wherein team persons are allocated periodically to different workgroups. Also, individual employees could be paired across teams in a bid to develop and reinforce the core ideas underlying interdepartmental coordination. Management teams, on their part, could deploy their expertise to shape the contours of such initiatives through the agency of connected diagrams.
- Digital Communication Boosts Teamwork
Digital channels of communication remain a vital aspect when we consider generating higher levels of collaboration among the many levels of modern organizations. In this context, leaders may invest in the hardware and software packages that comprise digital communication systems in a bid to boost interdepartmental coordination, and by implication, the quality of outcomes. Digital can speed up interactions between teams and clients, between supervisors and associates, and also helps promote the contemporary concept of a distributed workplace. Coordination between teams also receives the proverbial shot in the arm when digital interfaces accelerate the pace of performance of review mechanisms that remain central to the success of projects. A selection of connected diagrams could help design the outlines of such strategies, thereby boosting the performance of organizations in the long run.
- Why Feedback Loops?
Feedback mechanisms, when implemented efficiently in different levels of organizations, can enrich the quality and scope of interdepartmental coordination. It thus becomes easier to envisage versions of connected diagrams that outline the structure of feedback mechanisms and illustrate the benefits that flow in terms of higher coordination. For instance, supervisors of different teams could operate a significant edition of feedback mechanisms; this stance could enable organizations to obtain a persistent, high-level view of progress registered in operations and projects. In addition, we could embellish feedback systems with quality control mechanisms that enable smarter methods of coordination among team persons distributed across different layers of organizations. Flowcharts could prove central to the design of such ventures, thereby spotlighting the efficacy of such design-led initiatives.
- Re-Engineering the Work Ethic
“Pulling a cross-functional team together to tackle a project is a great way to get departments to interact.” This statement is thus a prime instance of high-quality strategizing designed to promote interdepartmental coordination. Further, organizations may re-engineer their work ethic to promote cross-functional teams and impress the centrality of such strategy into the worldviews of individual employees. When viewed from the client’s perspective, this strategy empowers organizations to deliver higher levels of performance, enables teams to attain faster turnaround times, and promotes better dialogue with various layers of organizations. A flowchart can assist organizations to refine the mechanics of such ideas, and observing the quality of outcomes as these emerge from implementations in real-world scenarios.
- Establishing Linkages, Driving Performance
Organizations that seek to encourage cross-team collaboration could consider linking team performance with company-wide goals and objectives. Readers may view this as part of continuing efforts to foster interdepartmental coordination to galvanize the human potential built into organizations. Sub-sets of this strategy could include explorations of the concept of team performance, with an underlying analysis of the motivations that impel teams and workgroups to invest in sustained levels of performance. Thus, linkages between team performance and company-wide goals could be etched within spaces of connected diagrams, enabling associates and employees to visualize the expanse and depth of these connections. In addition, flow-based diagrams could gain from inputs offered by team persons; subsidiary versions of diagrams could empower organizations to analyze the merits therein and incorporate these into ongoing initiatives designed to promote interdepartmental coordination.
- Team Alignments through Strategic Methods
“If you want two departments to be aligned, set goals they can only hit by working together.” This instance of noble observation can encourage businesses and organizations to explore new avenues in strategic thinking. Additionally, business leaders may elect to develop a deep view of the modern organization and re-examine the dynamics that exist between various components that interact to animate the organization. For instance, interdepartmental coordination may attain higher levels when product development teams work in tandem with market research groups nested within the same organization. In a different scenario, marketing teams working in e-commerce operations could join forces with business developers as part of efforts to drive deeper penetration of existing markets. These techniques, and their variations, could find visual expression within the spaces of modern flowcharts.
- To Conclude
These lines of exploration could potentially ignite the emergence of new perspectives in the domain of interdepartmental coordination. It would help to evaluate the concept from the points of view endorsed by multiple stakeholders; this is necessary to gain a deeper understanding of the benefits that flow from seamless coordination across teams. The participation of stakeholders remains critical to the success of such initiatives and hence, it would serve well to deploy flowcharts to map the role of each stakeholder in projects of this nature. Designers of diagrams could, therefore, source inspiration from relevant data documented by various organizations. The use of data enriches the idea of cooperation and coordination, thereby reinforcing the use of numbers in designing future versions of ventures.
