Cross-departmental projects lie at the crossroads of strategy and complexity. Marketing depends on product, product depends on engineering, finance is looking at costs, and leadership oversees everything. With multiple moving parts, projects can quickly run into delays, misunderstandings, and duplication of work among shared roles and responsibilities. Spreadsheets and emails are unable to cope with a level of coordination that is imperative. Organizations need systems to coordinate communication, planning, and execution. Modern project management tools are well established to provide exactly that foundation to bring departments together in sync and not in silos.
However, the advantages of good digital tools do not merely come from aligning teams or unifying operations. Digital tools provide a strong level of accountability. By making accountabilities visible, tracking progress transparently, and relieving duplicative work synonymous with enterprise initiatives, organizations generally organize a series of broken workflows into a unified framework. A more developed solution gives departments the ability to action faster/longer while remaining aware of how their responsibilities fit into the overall initiative. This inherent clarity and understanding promote this standstill not stagnating and ultimately creating value in cross-departmental projects.
Lark Base: unifying data and responsibilities
The top challenge across multiple departments is visibility, and Lark Base solves that by centralizing project information into structured databases with clear milestone tracking, work tasks, and ownership. Leaders can see the big picture while employees work in the views that make sense to them, such as kanban boards, grids, or dashboards. Automations ensure updates happen in real time, reducing the chance of miscommunication. Via Lark Base, users can instantly construct a centralized data hub, a project management center or an all-in-one CRM app—linking customer-facing initiatives with internal deliverables.
Lark Docs: aligning departments around shared context
Modern multi-departmental projects have a number of issues, and one of the most common is misalignment due to static or outdated documentation. Lark Docs solves those problems by providing a unified area where teams can co-edit documents, proposals, or roadmaps in one living space. Embedded Sheets allow data to stay live, so that decisions are being made according to the best numbers available. The inline comments feature allows feedback to stay tied to content, minimizing miscommunication. The version history feature is great to clarify how a project or idea has evolved and provides teams the ability to track decisions and avoid redundancy in work. With Docs, every department is engaged anywhere from writing the first draft to updating a proposal boiler plate – both literally (and figuratively) the same document, getting alignment to happen and staying aligned is much easier.
Lark Messenger: keeping communication focused and actionable
When collaborating across departments, communication can rapidly become messy. Lark Messenger provides the structure you need to keep conversations grounded and connected to outcomes. Threaded discussions center conversations around specific topics while pinned announcements identify critical updates across departments. Buzz notifications slice through the noise for urgent communication that needs to be seen by the right people quickly. Messenger also links directly to tasks, and approvals, because conversations are steps in execution. Teams now communicate to get things done as efficiently as possible, rather than resorting to long chains of emails or disparate chat platforms disconnected from project outcomes.
Lark Minutes: capturing outcomes to avoid repeated discussions
Cross-department projects usually require a lot of meetings, and those meetings can often become repetitive and a waste of time if important discussions go un-followed up on. Lark Minutes eliminates this issue by automatically capturing discussions, providing a transcription, and creating written summaries. It takes action items from meetings and links them to a task or project record, so action items aren’t missed. Employees who can’t attend meetings can read summaries instead of asking if everyone can meet again, saving an extremely precious resource, i.e., time. Lark minutes can carry more than one important discussion into an action item in other departments when every discussion turns into some item professionally, meaning Minutes can reduce the pain of multiple meetings and more easily maintain momentum in/among departments.
Lark Approval: removing bottlenecks from decision-making
In any multi-department project, approvals can frequently be the bottleneck that holds a project back. Lark Approval facilitates the approval process by normalizing and routing requests. Each custom form can collect the right details at the beginning of the request to reduce clarifications between departments. Automated routing ensures that the requests are routed to the correct decision-makers quickly, and Messenger notifications make requests visible in the workday. Every decision is stored in an automated workflow for transparency and accountability. Requests travel faster with more predictable sign-offs, departments can stay aligned, and the project can move forward easily.
Lark Calendar: coordinating schedules across departments
When programming involves multiple departments and time zones, scheduling becomes exponentially more complicated. Lark Calendar solves this transparency and aligns availability to the project calendar timeline. Shared views allow departments to see each other’s commitments and prohibit conflicts, and align teams with more ease. Smart reminders also help participants to be prepared, and any links to Docs or Base keep the meeting inherently connected to the context. The Calendar also changes from a metronome to a project alignment tool to keep teams in check and prevent scheduling from becoming an unexpected source of conflict.
Conclusion: building alignment across departments
To successfully manage projects on a cross-departmental basis you need more than good intentions; you need digital tools that unify the work into a single system. Lark provides you with that foundation. Base unifies data and responsibilities, Docs aligns the departments around living documents, Messenger makes communication purposeful, Minutes guarantees outcomes are captured, Approval eliminates bottlenecks, Calendar aligns schedules.
This suite of tools allows cross-departmental projects to move forward with clarity, accountability, and momentum. Instead of spending time trying to reconcile silos and rehash past conversations, teams can focus on execution and outcomes. Using Lark, departments stop working in isolation and start working towards collective progress.
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