Cross Project collaboration within the same Organization

Our Product Teams are all in one Project, however, our Operations team was set up as a separate project within the same organization.  In hindsight, we should have set up one project with multiple teams.  

Is it possible to assign product backlog items from the Product Team project to the separate Operations Project?  Can the Product team create a task in the Operations team "Area", when the parent story is in the separate Product team Project?