Author – Sanjeevani Sathe, VP Inbound Strategy and Content Creation at Whizible
Are your project managers working in silos, thinking about only their own projects? Even within the project teams, are the team members doing their job in silos without taking into consideration the priorities and dependencies of their work with that of other team members?
Is it a systemic problem in your organization, or is it person-specific? Are these silos creating an unhealthy work culture and team rivalries? Is there a simple but effective solution to avoid silos in your project organization?
What are silos?
Merriam-Webster dictionary defines silos as “a trench, pit, or especially a tall cylinder (as of wood or concrete) usually sealed to exclude air and used for making and storing silage” or “a deep bin for storing material (such as coal)” “an underground structure for housing a guided missile” They interpret silos in a business sense as “an isolated grouping, department, etc., that functions apart from others especially in a way seen as hindering communication and cooperation.”
It is interesting to note that the definition of silos mentions a tall closed structure or a deep underground structure for storage. Both denote a closed, isolated existence causing hoarding or a potentially damaging outcome.
What are silos in an organizational context?
Organizational silos can manifest in 3 ways
1. Mental silos – Mental silos in an organizational context mean that employees are not open to sharing knowledge with their colleagues. This makes team collaboration difficult, and the team-based activities and projects suffer.
Mental silos can be caused due to the inherent nature of that employee not to be open to collaboration if he/she is a loner or prefers to work alone. But many times this happens if there is an unhealthy competition between different project teams/ functional teams/ departments and employees just want to focus on their work and avoid helping others by not sharing their resources or knowledge.
Mental silos in organizations can start at the top, with the project leaders/ managers getting protective about their projects at the cost of other projects running at the same time. Many project-based businesses use matrix organization structure where they have functional departments, and each project is staffed using the functional experts. This leads to project teams having to report to two managers – their functional head and the project manager. This can create a conflict situation and result in mental silos.
Organization culture plays an important role in managing the mental silos of the employees. One uncooperative leader can disrupt the performance of the project organization.
2. Process silos – The success of project-based businesses depends on team collaboration. Project teams are supposed to share resources and project-related knowledge to achieve excellence. This needs transparency into the processes, goals, priorities of all the functional and project teams.
The process workflows followed at various stages in a project are critical to the successful and on-time project delivery. We observe that some project managers use different, optimized process workflows for their projects, which might be better than the standard workflows followed by others. But due to mental silos, they may end up not sharing these optimized workflows with the other teams.
These process silos can result in loss of team productivity or degraded output quality and cause project losses.
3. Data silos – A most observed type of silos in a project services organization are the Data Silos. Different functional departments in an organization don’t share their information/ data in a timely manner with other departments, in turn adversely affecting the activities of these departments. (aka “department hero” situation)
I can give you many examples of data silos. The marketing team not sharing the lead generation campaign planned with the sales team, making the sales team difficult to prepare the sales forecast.
Or the sales team not sharing accurate information about the sales pipeline and conversion possibilities with the resource managers and HR managers, making it tough for them to predict the resource requirement and recruitment planning.
Another example could be the project managers not sharing their resource utilization data with each other, resulting in idle resources on some projects and staff shortage for some projects, resulting in project delays and low profits.
Sometimes data silos are created just because there is no single tool to collect all the project data at one place, and hence all data can not be integrated at one place to make the right decisions.
Data silos also get created when different teams are using different tools for recording their project management activities, and these tools are not integrated, leading to islands of project data not talking to each other.
For example, using different tools for resource scheduling and helpdesk, making it difficult to know the resource availability for assigning issue tickets, resulting in a delay in servicing issue tickets, thereby making customers unhappy.
Silos are not good for the health of project-based businesses.
Organizational silos can result in
1. Delayed projects/ poor quality of project deliverables
2. Customer dissatisfaction
3. Lost revenue, low profitability
Is it possible to break these organizational silos?
Download the eBook to know how to break organizational silos
Whizible CPO Satish Bora conducted a webinar on “Are you facing tools silos syndrome & lacking handle on metrics of your business?” with Sunil Gupta, the Founder and CEO of Innoval Digital Solutions Pvt Ltd.
You can listen to the recording of this on-demand webinar.
