The Top Tools To Manage Cross-Functional Teams
The 5 categories of tools you need to consider to organise and run your cross-functional teams effectively.
Executive Summary
In today’s fast-paced business environment, cross-functional teams are proving essential to tackle complex challenges and foster innovation. Comprising members from diverse departments, these teams break down traditional silos, enhance collaboration, and deliver holistic solutions. According to research published by
Deloitte, cross-functional teams can help organisations innovate and adapt faster than single-specialism teams thanks to the broad range of skills, knowledge, and resources at their disposal. However, while their potential is immense, their success depends on strategic management and effective tooling ecosystems.
Putting together a robust toolkit, with a specialist tool from each of these core categories to manage cross-functional teams is absolutely critical:
- HRIS/People Management: Central source for personnel information, including roles, skills, and locations.
- Strategy and Portfolio Management: Links vision and goals with delivery execution.
- Collaboration: Enhances brainstorming and ideation between team members.
- Work Management: Supports work and task tracking and Agile workflows for teams.
- Team Management: A critical solution for modelling team structures, planning capacity, and linking teams to their work and strategy.
By adopting the right combination of tools, organisations can streamline processes, enhance collaboration, and unlock the full potential of cross-functional teams. A coordinated tooling ecosystem ensures better communication, alignment with strategy, and data-driven insights, empowering teams to innovate and deliver results in a competitive landscape.
Why are cross-functional teams becoming increasingly popular?
A cross-functional team is composed of individuals from different departments or areas of expertise within an organisation. Unlike traditional teams that are made up of members from a single department and organised around a single function — such as marketing, finance, or engineering — a cross-functional team brings together diverse skills, perspectives, and knowledge to become self-sufficient in creating new value for the business.
This structure steps outside of traditional department silos, improves employee engagement, and encourages innovation and collaboration, finding solutions to business problems more efficiently.
Depending on the approach an organisation chooses to adopt, cross-functional teams may be organised into “
value stream”, “
tribe”, “
team-of-teams” or “
release train” structures. The chosen structure should take into account team size, the work the teams do, the types of team interactions expected, longevity of the teams, role compositions and locations. To learn more on this, take a look at our
Team Structures guide.
Cross-functional teams often operate in a matrix-like structure rather than following a traditional reporting line hierarchy, where different leaders may have responsibility for delivery, compared with areas such as professional and career development, performance and remuneration.
If you want to learn more about the benefits of cross-functional teams, a good place to start is this light read from
hrnews.
Assembling your cross-functional team toolkit
With the proliferation of cross-functional teams, organisations need to put together the right team toolkit, or tooling ecosystem, to make the management process smoother, enabling better communication, collaboration, and work tracking.
In this guide, we’ll explore the essential tool types that you need to consider, to help you understand the purpose of each type and the role that it plays within the ecosystem.
- People / HRIS – Central source for personnel information, including roles, skills, and locations.
- Strategy / Portfolio Management – A system to document enterprise strategy, goals, and OKRs.
- Work / Task Management – A tool that allows teams to break down, assign, and track work progress.
- Collaboration – A place for teams to brainstorm and share ideas.
- Teams – A platform to build and maintain cross-functional team structures, people allocations and team planning.
1. People / HRIS Systems
Key features:
The People / HRIS systems serve as an unified solution, seamlessly integrating HR, payroll, and, in some cases, financial systems. It centralises key personnel data such as location, job grade, and salary, while also providing accurate management of organisational reporting structures.
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Why you still need other tools in your toolkit:
HRIS systems are designed to display a single hierarchy, typically reflecting traditional reporting lines rather than dynamic cross-functional team structures. While highly effective for personnel management, the sensitive nature of personnel information limits data access to selective individuals, limiting broader team visibility and accessibility.
In addition, most HRIS systems do not support integration with additional data layers, such as project work or strategic objectives hence they lack the flexibility needed for day-to-day task management or project tracking.
Tooling examples: Workday,
SAP SuccessFactors,
BambooHR 2. Strategy and Portfolio Management Systems
Key features:
Strategy and portfolio management system excels in capturing enterprise themes, strategic goals, and OKRs while offering robust financial tracking features, including complex budgeting, timesheeting, and resource allocation for large-scale agile teams. Its seamless integration with other work management tools makes it ideal for managing cross-departmental projects, providing leadership with comprehensive top-level visibility.
Why you still need other tools in your toolkit:
Strategy platforms are primarily designed for high-level goal setting and tracking, but they lack the ability to dynamically visualise or model cross-functional team structures. While effective for managing strategy, these tools offer limited traceability for day-to-day tasks, making it challenging to identify overutilised teams and thus facilitate delivery prioritisation conversations.
Additionally, most strategy and portfolio management platforms do not integrate with team or people data, restricting insights into how strategic goals align with team capacity, skills and capabilities.
Tooling examples: Planview,
Clarity,
Jira Align,
Microsoft Viva Goals,
Workboard, Microsoft Excel
3. Work Management Tools
Key features:
Many existing work management tools are currently designed for agile teams as they often support methodologies like Scrum and Kanban with features such as sprints, issue tracking, and burndown charts. Its high level of customisation allows teams across various functions such as development, marketing, operations, or sales to create tailored workflows suited to their needs.
Additionally, many work management tools offer seamless integration with other tools like Confluence, Bitbucket, Slack and GitHub for effective team delivery collaboration.
Why you still need other tools in your toolkit:
While highly effective for software development teams, work management tools are less suitable for non-technical teams due to its complexity in use. It lacks functionality for individual people allocation, limiting visibility into true capacity. Additionally, its inability to aggregate data across multiple boards makes it challenging to provide consolidated insights for senior leaders to trace deliverables back to strategic objectives in order to know the true progression of their intended enterprise strategy.
Tooling examples: Jira, monday.com, Azure DevOps, Rally 4. Collaboration Tools
Key features:
Collaboration tools generally excel in visually representing ideas, making it ideal for brainstorming, mind mapping, and outlining project plans in an easily understandable format for all team members. It supports real-time collaboration, enabling teams to work together effectively and efficiently, regardless of physical location.
Additionally, it offers a variety of templates tailored for cross-functional team collaboration, catering to teams in various departments such as marketing, product development, and design.
Why you still need other tools in your toolkit:
As mentioned earlier, collaboration tools excel in brainstorming and early-stage project planning; however, they fall short in comprehensive project management, detailed task tracking, and individual resource allocation. Without proper organisation, boards can become cluttered, making progress difficult to track. Moreover, these tools are not designed for effective people management, limiting leaders' ability to oversee who is allocated to which team, at what capacity, and performing which tasks.
Additionally, they lack integration with strategy, OKRs, team, or people data, making it challenging to assess work delivery. Their minimal data aggregation and analytic capabilities further hinder the ability to present leaders with consolidated insights on team progression against work and identify potential delivery risks.
Tooling examples: Miro, Microsoft Teams Whiteboard, Confluence Whiteboard, Trello The final tool in the toolkit
The last tool you’ll need in your cross-functional team management toolkit is one that allows you to model and manage your teams in one place, while also connecting them to their work and the business strategy. This enables leaders to see at a glance who’s on their team — both now and in the near future — at what capacity, and the work they’re doing.
Currently, many organisations use a manual spreadsheet for this job; however, Market Watch reports that nearly 90% of spreadsheets contain errors, and Gartner's research shows that organisations lose an average of $13.3 million annually due to bad data.
To streamline and automate the data handling process, improve accuracy, and benefit from a data-driven team planning experience, you need a specific team management platform.
5. Team Management Tools
Key features:
Team management tools enhance the employee onboarding experience and streamline team management by providing a centralised source of truth. This allows employees to easily access essential people and team information without searching across multiple systems.
These tools maintain up-to-date team data, enabling the creation of distribution lists and the identification of communities of practice or guilds. Through integration with other platforms, they offer a unified view of team availability, skills, and task assignments, detailing who is working on what, when, and where.
This comprehensive visibility improves both short- and long-term planning, empowering leaders to make informed prioritisation decisions by identifying areas of capacity contention and aligning resources with critical work.
Why you still need other tools in your toolkit:
While the team management tool can integrate and display various data sets from HRIS, portfolio or strategy platforms, and work management tools, it often requires users to make any data updates in the source system rather than within the team management tool. However, this is not a major limitation as it is always best to fix issues at their source to ensure data integrity.
Tooling examples: TeamForm, Microsoft Excel
Summary
Choosing the right tools for cross-functional team management depends on your organisation’s unique needs and individual project requirements. Each tool has its strengths and limitations, but with the right approach, they can be leveraged to boost productivity and collaboration. Effective cross-functional team management demands a well-coordinated, complementary tooling ecosystem that streamlines processes, enhances data accessibility, and maintains alignment with strategic goals.
With this ecosystem in place, organisations can enjoy smoother communication and collaboration, and gain valuable insights into team performance, ultimately driving results that align with organisational objectives. By deploying and integrating tools across the five key categories, your organisation can unlock the full potential of cross-functional teams to innovate, adapt, and lead in your industry.
TeamForm helps you seamlessly manage your cross-functional teams, so if you'd like to learn more, why not book a call today? Book a call
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