Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella famously predicted that “Every company will be a software company”. Fast-forward to now and its clear he had it right. In today’s world what sets companies apart is how quickly they create the applications they need, so this article will explore the reasons why fusion teams are the fastest way to work, and how you can get started. At least 84% of companies and 59% of government entities have already set up fusion teams — and there’s a good reason why. They can help speed up transformation projects (such as enterprise app development) and make the finished output more successful. According to Gartner, fusion teams progress 2.5x faster than centralized sequential efforts. But what exactly is a fusion team, how can they transform your business, and what do you need to be able to start building your own one?
Fusion teams are a multidisciplinary group brought together to drive transformation. They bring together a blend of operational subject matter expertise and technical skills from developers to product owners, UX designers, and other domain specialists. Instead of focusing on the traditional responsibilities of their role or department, fusion team members are orientated around a shared, specific goal. That might involve building a new tool to automate internal workflows or redesigning the interface of your website. They also include interdisciplinary experts that are responsible for overseeing projects, allocating resources, and anticipating barriers that might slow progress.
Enterprise transformation projects are complex to plan and deliver. Because they require a diverse range of skills to succeed you need people that think differently and bring different strengths and skills to the table. You need business users that know how your organization works, where your bottlenecks are, and how to deliver products or solutions that your customers will find most valuable. And you need IT users that have strong technical skills and understand the most efficient ways to manage information and enterprise technology, making sure that the solutions you create are scalable and agile so that they can meet the needs of the business in the future as well as right now. Fusion teams are the best way to bring all this expertise together in a coordinated and focused manner, allowing you to achieve more than either business users or IT users could ever accomplish on their own, and also to make faster progress than more traditional approaches to business-IT collaboration. And better business-IT collaboration is critical to enabling faster transformation, partly because it enables less technical users to reduce the burden on IT teams by taking ownership of more aspects of digital projects. This is something that IT teams need more than ever as they face a growing backlog of requests and often stagnant resources and budgets to meet those needs, particularly under tough economic conditions. Put simply, organizations need to get their people collaborating on transformation in the most effective way possible, and fusion teams are the answer to that.
- Accelerated project delivery: Fusion teams are self-governed and autonomous in nature. Without interdepartmental oversight and admin slowing things down, projects are typically delivered much faster enabling the organization to be more agile in response to changing market and customer needs.
- Improved knowledge sharing: By pooling diverse skillsets from your business in a coordinated team, it’s far easier to share knowledge and find quick workarounds to problems that would otherwise be hindered by siloed structures and thinking. - User-focused: Your business users have a solid day-to-day perspective on the needs of your customers and employees. Those real-world insights can help you create a product or solution that has real utility, solving a problem or improving a service that your end-users will truly value.
- Better security: Enabling business and IT to collaborate on projects allows IT to oversee the implementation of the required security measures and reduces the possibility of unauthorised access and cybersecurity risks.
Here are five key considerations before you get started: 1. Select the right use case: The first step is to identify a business use case that your fusion team can collaborate on. Ideally, it should be relatively straightforward — early on, the idea is to establish effective working processes and build confidence through quick wins. 2. Identify the right team members: While you might have a core group of members, your fusion team should bring in specialists based on the use case. Alongside business technologists, you’ll want to bring on board different Citizen Developers that have expertise with specific systems or technical tasks, such as managing auditing software or internal reporting tools. 3. Set security standards: Security is often presumed to be the responsibility of IT. But every member of a fusion team will need to adhere to your security and compliance standards. Be sure to clearly communicate these standards and consider holding training sessions to get everyone up to speed. 4. Governability: A successful fusion team program clearly defines the role each user must play and how the platform enables this control. 5. Select a platform for innovation: When bringing together people with different skillsets and ways of working, you will face barriers because people think in different ways and even speak in different languages. A platform for application development can create a common ground.
Low-code platforms are essential for fusion teams for two main reasons: - Firstly, the backbone of any effective enterprise application is the business process that the application needs to support and enable. Low-code platforms use process models as the core of the application, and once your fusion team agrees on the process, everything else needed for the application stems from that.
- The best low-code platforms (Bizagi included) provide different interfaces for different types of users within your fusion team. This enables technical and minimal-to-non-technical users to collaborate in a single environment, but to have access to different pieces of the puzzle. For example, you may want everyone to be able to work on the business rules, but only technical users need access to add scripts or work on integrations and security.
ManpowerGroup brought their business and IT users together with our low-code automation platform. By applying more agile, collaborative ways of working, they’ve been able to cut average SLA completion time by 95% and reduce tedious Excel and email work by 90%. “Bizagi has become a philosophy – not just a system – which binds business and IT together in effective collaboration."
Rui Dinis
Director of Finance & Administration
To learn more about Bizagi’s low-code process automation platform and how it enables fusion teams, download our platform overview brochure and send us a message. We’ll be happy to help answer any questions that you have.
