collaborative ways of working -strive for collaboration
In a cross functional team, people often have different skills and areas of expertise which can result in team members struggling with how they work together toward a shared goal. Sometimes people in such teams are actually just cooperating instead of collaborating. For example, consider a team where a programmer finishes all the coding before handing it over to a tester who, once they complete the testing, hands it over to a stakeholder to check the result. They cooperate with each other to work toward a common goal but have a distinct divide in tasks and responsibilities with each team member fulfilling their own task within their own expertise.
Collaboration on the other hand involves people working together toward a shared goal in an interactive and interdependent way, where team members are not solely fulfilling their own tasks. In our previous example, imagine the programmer, tester and stakeholder meeting and writing acceptance tests together for a Product Backlog Item instead of handing work over to each other.
Collaboration needs communication, trust, shared responsibility and decision making. Collaboration in a Scrum Team means team members make a collective effort to work together toward a shared goal and deliver at least one Done Increment each Sprint. To help ensure that the work the Scrum Team delivers is valuable, they need to think together, share responsibilities and have team ownership while also working closely with their stakeholders, including customers and end users.