Silos in organizations are vertical areas of domain expertise, and they are an obstacle to functioning cross functional agile teams. The leaders of these domains are invaluable in supporting and growing these teams.
The skills required for hardware or physical product development are many today, and it is important to draw on the great experience of leaders in these domains.
Here I tell you how this can be realized in practice, especially in companies developing high-tech products where domain skills are very high.
Keepers of organizational silos and their importance
Silos as sealed containers are a metaphor for vertical expertise restricted to a group of people or a single person who are experts in a specific domain.
This is the result of the decomposition of work and consequent specialization, aimed at the pursuit of efficiency.
Silos in organizations are also functional to the logic of sequential (waterfall) product development where different departments work in a loosely integrated manner.
This generates long processes characterized by local domain optimum but not global product optimum.
In contrast, the agile approach focuses on the integration of skills and an effectiveness-focused process that, by reducing rework, increases speed and indirectly efficiency.
In the case of hardware products, the skills required are many: from design, to environmental impact throughout the product life cycle, to manufacturability and assembly, to usability, just to name a few. See article The Organization of an Agile Team for Concurrent Design.
The skills required are so specific that domain specialists must be involved.
These specialists, in most cases, are employed part-time in the project.
Knowledge Management and Organizational Silos
Breaking down silos is a statement I have heard many times as a consequence of establishing cross functional teams.
But what does it mean to pull down silos?
It means distributing within each development team the domain knowledge held by people in a particular office or department.
This has many benefits such as growing people’s soft skills and understanding the multiplicity of perspectives on the development of a particular hardware product.
At the same time it involves the difficulty of presiding over the skills and knowledge of a specific domain in the best way.
An organizational silo in this sense ensures:
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- The domain standard that the company decides to adopt and that are transferred to all products under development.
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- Domino training to new hires
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- Silo technology scouting, i.e., continuous technical upgrading of the domain team regardless of a product’s development needs
These silos are manned by domain experts led by a domain leader or domain leader who have mastery of the subject matter they deal with.
Mastery requires effort, many hours of application and a strong motivation that comes from a passion for your work.
The domain leaders I have met have this passion in common.
Tearing down silos without appropriate countermeasures will result in loss:
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- The standardization of domain methodologies
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- The growth of domain technical developments through the sharing of solutions emerging from product development done by different teams
There are several articles in the agility world within which we debate the possible creation of team silos or horizontal silos when breaking down vertical domain silos.
In this way, teams can adopt divergent technical approaches and solutions to each other.
In more than 10 years of agile hardware product development, with very high specialized skills, the issue of skill silos has been a crucial issue for me.
When, on the other hand, the skills required for product development are not so specialized and are relatively common to multiple team members, this is not a serious problem.
Agile management of skill silos
In my opinion and in the opinion of us at Agile Factory pulling down silos, in a high-tech hardware company, can be very counterproductive.
The companies developing these products, in which I get involved with Agile Factory colleagues or other agile coaches, very frequently employ domain majors in new product development.
This causes these experienced people to unintentionally become the bottleneck of product development.
Companies are asking us to find a solution to increase the number of teams at work by overcoming the limitation of the shortage of experts.
Building a cross functional agile team with less experienced people and with the presence as stakeholders of domain managers (domain leaders) makes it possible to resolve an apparent contradiction:
How does a team of less experienced people develop a new product at the same level as what a team consisting of the most experienced people in each domain could do?
The solution is for domain leaders to serve as stakeholders and mentors to people on the team committed to employing domain knowledge.
This makes it possible to avoid mistakes due to inexperience and in the contentment to have new creative opportunities.
An experienced person ends up preferring solutions already adopted in the past.
A person new to the domain is more inclined and able to explore new solutions, knowing that he or she can count on the support of an outstanding stakeholder such as the domain leader.
A careful balance between cross-functional teams led by POs and cross-domain support from domain leaders ensures technical excellence.
Silos that become so porous and there is a need to create communities of practice (CoPs), led by domain leaders, to ensure domain technical growth and cross-domain dissemination of knowledge.
