CER · Cross-functional teams in 2 hours

The Situation

The Clean Energy Regulator (CER) engaged ZXM to diagnose why delivery was stalling and design a path to cross-functional team structures that would hold under live delivery pressure. The branch ran eight teams across technology and policy functions, with work moving sequentially through each. Timeframes were tightening and requirements continued to shift.

The immediate ask was practical: restructure into three cross-functional agile teams without losing delivery momentum in the process. The harder constraint was cultural. Previous team changes had been manager-directed. The branch had no model for doing this differently.

What the diagnostic found

Before any team restructure was designed, ZXM mapped the existing delivery system to identify where work was actually stopping. The branch ran functional, component-based teams — technology separate from policy, systems separate from delivery. Each handoff between them added wait time that no individual team controlled and no team could see.

The primary finding was structural: the operating model required sequential throughput across capability silos, which meant that even high-performing individual teams could not accelerate end-to-end delivery. The bottleneck was not team behaviour. It was the architecture that determined how teams connected to each other and to the work.

A secondary pattern confirmed this. When requirements changed — which they did regularly — the change had to travel through each functional boundary before it reached the team that could act on it. This created compounding delay and eroded stakeholder confidence in delivery predictability.

What changed

ZXM designed a facilitated team formation process that addressed the structural condition directly: rather than managers reassigning people to new teams, the teams formed around the work themselves.

CER’s leadership endorsed the restructure into three cross-functional teams, each carrying the full capability needed to own a product from initiation to delivery. The team formation used a structured self-selection process — known as squadification — in which team members chose their teams within parameters set to ensure capability balance across skills, seniority, and availability.

Individual team members created profile cards describing their strengths, working preferences, and areas of interest. Each Product Owner pitched their team’s mission and the capabilities still needed. Three timeboxed rounds of self-placement followed, with Scrum Masters providing real-time capability feedback after each round. The process ran to completion in two hours.

The mechanism matters because it changed who held agency over team membership. Research on self-determination in workplace settings establishes that autonomy over how and with whom people work is a primary driver of motivation and sustained performance (Deci & Ryan, 1985; Ryan & Deci, 2000). Giving team members meaningful choice — bounded by organisational constraints — produced team identity from the point of formation, not weeks later.

Unlike manager-directed reassignment, no team member was left unplaced. The process produced three balanced, cross-functional teams with identities formed from the inside out — not assigned from above.

Following the formation event, each team ran naming and charter workshops to build shared identity and operating agreements. The structural change — from functional silos to cross-functional ownership — was in place before delivery resumed.

What held

Three cross-functional agile teams were formed and operational within a two-hour timeboxed event. What typically takes managers several weeks of negotiation and planning was completed in a single working session, with delivery continuity intact.

Each team emerged with the full capability mix needed to take a product from concept to delivery without sequential handoffs to other functions. End-to-end delivery time shortened as a direct result of eliminating the inter-team handoffs the previous model required. Collaboration across the three teams increased, because team members had chosen their working relationships rather than had them assigned.

Team members reported strong ownership of their new structures. The self-selection mechanism produced buy-in at formation that manager-directed restructures typically require months to build. Charter workshops run immediately after cemented operating agreements and team identity.

The operating model that produced the original constraint — functional silos connected by sequential handoffs — was replaced by one in which each team owned a value stream end to end. That structural change, not team motivation or individual performance, was what made faster delivery possible.