Presented by Tom Perry
Organizational silos are the source of the most pernicious dysfunctions you can find within any company. These divisions serve to isolate people in the organization within hyper-specialized roles. Ostensibly, we do this in order to help people succeed. The Justification might be that no one can be equally good at everything. Therefore, we compartmentalize our lives and those around us in order to filter out the extraneous noise.
Of course, it does not have to be this way. You can deliver a product successfully without compartmentalizing everyone and everything in an organization within an inch of its life. It requires a different mindset. One needs inter-disciplinary thinking that considers different skills and tries to synthesize a whole rather than divide. This requires a mindset that favors skill over roles and knowledge over assignment.
In this talk, we explore the causes of organizational silos, their impacts, and the strategies that you can employ to help mitigate their impact on your teams and within your organization.
Tom Perry
Tom has been working as a transformation agent in software development for over 20 years. He has worked on teams at startup companies, large corporations in the Fortune 100 and the State and Federal Government. His background includes testing, development, project/program management, agile coaching/mentoring and training. As part of his involvement in the greater agile community, he led the Seattle eastside chapter of the APLN as well as recently creating the Open Agile Management conference in Seattle. He is a speaker and author on Agile topics in local and international forums. He wrote "The Little Book of Impediments" which can be found on www.leanpub.com
(Due to Labor Day this month's meeting is on the second Tuesday of the month)