Cross Training

1. Defining Individual Roles and Responsibilities

Roles in a team are associated with related responsibilities. These may include discrete tasks, ongoing work areas, management, monitoring, approaches, and perspectives, etc.

EXAMPLE

One team member may be an advocate for high-quality user experience.

Take a look at the diagram below to get a visual on how to define individual roles and responsibilities. It's important to clearly define these roles by explicitly indicating the responsibilities associated with each role.

You can see there's a plethora of responsibilities beneath the job title of graphic designer. The relationship between goals and responsibilities should be very close. A team goal and personal goals should all be in alignment. They should also be SMART goals: specific, measurable, action-oriented, realistic, and time-phased.

Responsibilities, just like goals, need to be SMART. The responsibilities of your graphic designer are going to bubble up to the team goals. The team goals drive the nature and the specifics of what is needed from each team member in regards to their responsibilities.

think about it

Why do you need such clearly defined roles?

One reason is to minimize or eliminate overlapping responsibility to avoid duplication of effort.

2. Cross Training

When individuals have similar or interacting roles, it's important to define the boundaries and limitations between them by clearly indicating responsibilities. This avoids conflict relative to gray areas between the two.

Although discrete roles are beneficial, there are also many benefits to training employees to have expertise in other roles. This is called cross training. Cross training improves group comprehension and overall connection. They understand each other. This also means increased flexibility. Your team as a whole benefits from that.

There will also be improved ability to cover gaps in case you lose a team member. It's always beneficial to have increased skill set and decreased boredom. You want to enhance the employees' skill set. While cross training is beneficial, you still want to make sure that roles and responsibilities are clearly defined.

2. Organizational and RACI Charts

Organizational charts can help with defining roles and responsibilities. These charts generally include the reporting structure for each individual, along with their name and job title.

EXAMPLE

This example simply has job titles. In some cases, an organizational chart may include goals, roles, and responsibilities.

You can see that the account director manages three account managers. The account managers manage junior account executives, and the junior account executives manage the billing analysts.

Another chart often used to indicate responsibilities across the team is a RACI chart. The RACI chart will indicate who is consulted. RACI stands for responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed. It makes clear to all team members who is accountable for what responsibility and what their contribution to each project will be.

EXAMPLE

In the example below, the project sponsor is the consultant for the security governance draft. The business analyst is the person responsible for executing functional requirements. The project manager is going to be informed of the functional requirements.