The importance of breaking down silos

Silo’s what did they ever do for us?
 
Just days before lockdown, I started an engagement with a client. Luckily, I had managed to get a few face to face meet and greets before we went completely remote.   
 
My specific task was to work with stakeholders across the business to prioritise a large legacy of backlog features across different product offerings and teams. It was to understand the usual reporting and management procedures and understand how to use them within the initiative for creating buy in and provide project reporting engagement. 
 
As is usual for large business, each product line has its own targets and KPI’s and to a degree its own vision. Each team, and rightly so is very much focussed on hitting their targets and delivering the best features and functionality for their own individual areas. This by its very nature creates siloed thinking, which everyone understands can impact initiatives. 
 
Necessity is the mother of innovation!
 
After barely a hello, Covid hit, and the organisation was forced to rewrite all its procedures and rapidly rethink its business and product strategy. The positive was a re-evaluation of the value of each of the usual interactions.  
 
The focus of the entire organisation shifted to what do we need now and what will we need in the future to create value. This kind of disruptive change often yields innovative solutions. 
But in my case, I feel the most valuable shift was the objectivity. 
 
Fortuitous for my project, which required a wholesale rethink of how the organisation presented its product offering. The refreshing objectivity allowed a clear focus on the roadmap of features and the future direction of the project within the context of a pivoting organisation. 
 
The project was to deliver a broad programme of platform improvements with a fixed level of technical resources. On-going backlog prioritisation was essential but in the first instance what was required was a common platform for understanding value. 
 
What was essential, was that collectively, across product lines, all the business stakeholders set, understood and agreed with how priorities were arrived at, based on one vision. A common language was used to express benefits, and these were understood and agreed upon at a collective level. 
 
Stakeholders had an easy means of understanding third party aspirations within the platform and could have empathy with priorities given to invisible parties within the organisation, site users or other visible and potentially competing groups. 
 
A shared and agreed platform created a consensus and facilitated the ease of delivering the digital products that would add real value in a rapidly evolving programme. 
 
Change is hard, and transformational change harder still. With the rapid and evolving shifts, we are experiencing at the moment the opportunity to understand clearly and collectively what is important now and moving forward is key. 
 
Breaking down silos is not easy. Having an outside lens facilitating this within your business has many benefits such as objectivity, clarity of vision and subject matter expertise, which JumpRock can provide.
 
If you would like to understand how JumpRock can assist your teams break down your silo’s and facilitate transformational change, please do get in touch. We are happy to help. 

Mona Ranjan

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