I read this comic last week and found it to be quite representative of what I see in most functional organizations.

While a functional organization reduces complexity to work on only a part of your pipeline, it sure does provide ample opportunities for skirting responsibility, blaming others and generally building trust voids within the organization.

One of the first, and often initially most skeptical, changes that I put in place within an organization is the concept of cross-functional team. But beyond that, a team that is responsible for as much of the pipeline as possible. 

Take for example a new company I provided some initial training and coaching for... They were relatively small with four teams:

1. Search
2. Reporting
3. Front End
4. Other

 Seams harmless. However, their product managers (soon to become product owners) were responsible for only two functions (simplified):

1. supply-side - those that produced content for their business
2. demand-side - those that consumed content from their business

Thus, their product managers were coordinating across four teams to get their work done. Teams had a number of dependencies they needed to manage. This all required project management to coordinate all of the interrelated communication lines.

My recommendation was simple - create supply-side and demand-side teams, align them with the product owners and give them responsibility over the pipeline. Well, after much skepticism, vocal "buts", and much discussion, the organization has decided to restructure around this premise. Many of the "buts" are real and will require some changes to the way people work on a team and the technology they work on at times. This is not easy to do, but once teams make this transition - it is amazing to see the teamwork evolve!

Now, this is a relatively simple example, but serves to underscore the fundamental problem - and that problem gets worse the larger the organization is. Yet, it is this very same change that has made larger case studies like Salesforce.com, JDA Software and others successful.