What is cross functionality?
Cross functionality is a property rather than an event. A cross-functional team contains the skills it needs to finish the job without waiting on another department. A cross-functional person understands enough of the adjacent disciplines to work with them well: a producer who can read an edit, a designer who understands the shoot, a strategist who knows what a sound mix costs. Cross function is the act of collaborating; cross functionality is the capacity that makes it possible.
In agencies it tends to grow with proximity. People who sit near the edit learn what editors need. People who never leave their department learn to defend it.
Why it matters
Why cross functionality matters
Modern campaigns do not respect departmental lines. A launch is a film, a set of stills, a social program, a landing page and an event, and the audience experiences all of it as one idea. Teams with high cross functionality make that one idea; teams without it make five adjacent ones. It also makes an agency resilient. When the only person who understands the shoot schedule is on holiday, a cross-functional team keeps going.
For individuals it is a career multiplier. The creative who understands production gets the bigger jobs, because they can be trusted with the whole thing.
In practice
How cross functionality works in practice
- 01
Cross functionality is built on purpose. Teams are staffed with the disciplines the job needs from the start, and people are rotated through adjacent work: the junior producer sits in the grade, the designer visits the set. Tools are shared rather than departmental, so everyone sees the same schedule and the same files. Reviews include the people who will make the next stage, so a design decision is checked against the build before it is final.
- 02
Over time it becomes culture. Hiring looks for people with range as well as depth, and the agency's language stops dividing into creative and production. The test is whether a problem that spans two disciplines gets solved by the two people involved, or escalated to two managers.
At RIOT
Cross functionality at RIOT
Our cross functionality extends past the client work. The same team that makes films for Coach and Tiffany & Co. built Krova, our production software for bids, schedules, budgets and delivery, and runs AltSounds, our music video channel. Creative, production and product are not departments here. They are the same people on different days.
Watch out
What people get wrong about cross functionality
Confusing cross functionality with everyone doing everything. A cross-functional team still has specialists; the editor is still the editor. The point is that the specialists understand each other's work well enough to make decisions together. The other mistake is expecting it to appear by itself. Without shared tools, mixed teams and deliberate exposure, people retreat into their discipline, because it is comfortable there.
