How to win and play nice when working on cross-functional teams
One of the first client engagements I worked on as a management consultant was with 200 other consultants to move a company off of an internal system used by thousands of employees to a brand new state of the art system. It was a massive undertaking — Our 200 employee team was split across 12 different workstreams, and was so large that we often would clog the restaurants nearby during the lunch hour because so many of us were crowding in at the same time. This doesn’t take into account the additional 200–300 employees we were working with, including the CIO and CMO of the company.
When I joined the project things were in a bit of a tailspin — there was a huge milestone coming up and the entire project was behind and at risk of missing the go-live date. This was important for us as well as the client, and I was brought on to support Andrea, a woman who was in charge of leading the entire project.
Andrea’s job was to work with all of the project management leads, aka the people who ensured we were making progress and that everything was on track, and ultimately, to report to the project’s executive committee on how they were going to hit the deadline. While Andrea had a lot of responsibility, she did not necessarily have power — sure, she could tell people to do things, and sometimes they would do them, but there was no guarantee. And while Andrea was on the hook for trying to get this project delivered on schedule…
