How to build silos and decrease collaboration on purpose

Re:How to build silos and decrease collaboration on purpose by ineedasername on Saturday September 04, 2021 @01:18AM (#28412270)

Collaboration is when people work together to produce an outcome. When teams are collaborating, it means they’re working with other teams to achieve outcomes together. That’s often a sign the team isn’t set up well. Ideally, it should have what it needs to do what it needs without dependencies on other teams.

I think you'd need to be very careful about how you implement that philosophy. It has the potential to be a recipe for every team rolling their own solutions to the same problems over & over again with very little individual knowledge making its way to become institutional knowledge.

Making every team self sufficient, if not done carefully, also has the potential to be wasteful when it comes to skillsets that the team doesn't need on a full-time basis when a few teams could share the same staffer for whatever that skillset happens to be.

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Re:How to build silos and decrease collaboration on purpose by Jare on Saturday September 04, 2021 @02:42AM (#28412690)

This describes exactly what I have seen happen, with the exception of

> if not done carefully

I don't think you can really do it carefully and succeed. It can only work if the teams are naturally independent, i.e. with no overlap in workspace, projectspace and headspace. If you force that independence and separation you break stuff you need.

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Re:How to build silos and decrease collaboration on purpose by closeparen on Saturday September 04, 2021 @04:30PM (#28418827)

An under-appreciated element of teams rolling their own solutions is that teams vary in competence and solutions vary in quality. Preference for consistency at the expense of mediocrity is at least as serious a cultural disease in a large organization as the existence of “silos.”

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