The integration equation: Why silos stop you from scaling

This blog is part of a mini-series exploring the findings of our newly commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Tempo, called “Maximize Your Portfolio Management Processes”. You can check out the previous here or sign up for our webinar, where we'll be exploring the findings in detail.

If you open up a blog about improving business practices, you won’t go long without hearing people talk all about communication, agility, and improving collaboration. However, there is a key principle underlying it that often goes ignored: Integration.

According to the latest data from Maximize Your Portfolio Management Processes, less than 30% of respondents’ organizations have a portfolio management process that is integrated across the business.

Technology is at the center of communication and collaboration. Without proper integration and implementation, other business practices will only grow more difficult and never reach the potential of full Strategic Portfolio Management.

But the issues of integration are more than just having interesting tech and processes to get your teams working together more. Teams will make their own processes if there are none, and you can end up in an undesirable situation where multiple different teams have their own way of doing things that doesn’t combine well with other parts of the business.

If this happens, it can be a ruthless weight tying down your company from scaling. You can’t just slice out individuals (or teams) that are technically performing well in isolation – are they really that much of an issue?

Fortunately, you can fix this issue by breaking down the silo situation.

The silo situation

Silos can form in dozens of different ways. While none stand out as “the worst kind of silo to have in your organization,” they all cause relatively similar problems that you’ll want to avoid.

Some of the common silo types are:

• Teams getting entrenched in old or outdated practices

• Teams using tools no-one else in the organization uses

• Teams failing to communicate what they are working on and their dependencies

• Teams getting overworked and not having the time for reporting

• Teams not understanding or feeling engaged with new tools to input data

Respondents to the survey said their organizations feel the effects of these silos: Poor communication and collaboration across teams is a top challenge with the portfolio management process. Diving deeper, respondents in C-level roles were more likely to say their organization’s processes are adopted and integrated across the business compared to respondents in a director role. This suggests that C-levels are more disconnected from the day-to-day processes and falsely believe their teams are working together seamlessly.

But when we look at the data, lacking visibility into each other’s work and poor communication are some of the widest reported issues for portfolio management solutions. 

39% from a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting shared that their main challenge with portfolio management was misalignment caused by lacking visibility into one another’s work – only 1% off being the largest issue: Out-of-date tech (at 40%).

The study also found that the second most common challenge with the portfolio management process is poor communication and collaboration between departments or teams (35% of respondents).

Download the study

This lack of communication and visibility is a key indicator of silos forming – which can be cross-department, between teams, or even between senior management and the rest of the company.

Silos are more than just nuisances. They’re a hindrance to collaboration, lead to duplicate work, and harm your investments in future projects. Everything is slower and it just makes your team's working lives more difficult in the long run (even if it seems easier for those in the silo right now).

The solution? Visibility at scale

Silos don’t break themselves – you need to take active action to reach those teams and make the more aligned version of your organization the easiest and most attractive option for them.

The good news is that the answer to solving the silo situation lies in how they were formed in the first place. Teams that use different tools and different workflows can be brought back into the picture through sensitively and carefully phasing out legacy systems and getting everyone’s work on the same tooling.

Accessibility, flexibility, and modularity is key. You need to meet teams where they are with a toolkit that can bend to their needs, not break them into shape. 

The commissioned report from Forrest Consulting states: “Organizations need to address cultural approaches to departmental planning by taking a more holistic approach. Institute collaborative practices across all levels (executives, VPs, directors) for both planning and delivery.

“This will enable your organization to optimize investment value. Support collaboration by leveraging shared data in a planning system of record while establishing consistent cadence of reviews driven by continuous feedback. The benefit of having an integrated solution exposes data to decision-makers and supports collaborative decision-making across the business.”

This leads to why Tempo developed its suite to sync together with minimal input, maximum accessibility, and in a way that can integrate with as many of your team's tools as possible.

It is, of course, not a job for software alone to solve. Culture and team organization is a key factor in improving your silos, but software is what Tempo knows best – and how we can help in both the short and long term. 

The tools to break through to your silos

Common goals and a unified working vision is far easier to achieve when everyone is working within the same ecosystem. From there, you can see common objectives and how other teams work impacts your own. 

This is where solutions like roadmapping, project management, and resource tracking can be your first and simplest step to smashing down the barriers keeping your teams from collaborating. 

The key is to get to teams operating in a single view and not add to their daily workload through over-complicated additions that take them away from the tools they work in.

Let’s explore how Tempo can help you break down silos:

Structure PPM

If you don’t have any existing tools for your team to work in – this is where you can start to help your teams all begin working on a single platform that is easy to get started with. 

Structure PPM works alongside Jira to track the progress of all your issues in your organization and present them in a way your teams can easily follow. It creates adaptable, user-defined issue hierarchies and presents them in a spreadsheet-like view.

When everyone in the company – from different departments to the C-suite – can see project status, day-to-day tasks, and who is on what project, it becomes so much easier to communicate about work.

Empowered by a collective understanding of the work to be done, and how that aligns with the broader company goals – individuals, teams, and businesses prosper.

And integrated with Tempo’s Strategic Roadmaps, Structure becomes even more powerful. Leadership can create a single source of truth from high-level strategy to program, project, and team-level execution. In a few clicks planners can transition projects on a roadmap to a project execution phase by seamlessly creating a new structure, to deliver on what was planned.

Strategic Roadmaps

Strategic Roadmaps helps align your organization with boardroom-ready roadmaps that can be put together in minutes. One aligned team working to the same roadmap.

It can take your customer feedback, and the work being done by your teams, and use smart templates to present them in timeline, swimlane, or table views. That means everyone, from the individual to the board level, can see where what work is being done, what bigger pictures it connects to, and the dependencies between projects.

Strategic Roadmaps integrates with Jira, Azure DevOps, Monday.com, Asana, Trello, and more. This means it can drop into your workflows and start breaking down your silos instantly. 

Capacity Planner

Sometimes, silos aren’t just about bringing teams together and communicating – sometimes it’s about being able to identify the secret silos forming in your organization and ensuring that they don’t become an issue.

Capacity Planner drops right into your Jira and helps you staff smarter and determine where team members have time available and the projects they are working on.

That means you can spot those bottlenecks where silos or issues are forming early and the team members that might not be gelling together. It also helps you understand where business opportunities lie – opening the door to greater profitability.

Silo-smashing solutions

Silos can be a significant barrier to scaling and achieving organizational success. However, by understanding how silos are formed and implementing strategies to overcome them, businesses can foster a culture of collaboration and integration. 

Tempo’s solutions are there to help. Capacity Planner can help identify them, Structure can get you started on having everyone working in a single view, and Roadmaps ensures communication and alignment is possible across the organization.

Join the ranks of other successful businesses that have embraced tools like these and achieved remarkable growth.

If you want to see more insights from the commissioned study Maximize Your Portfolio Management Processes, Tempo's chief product officer, Shannon Mason, and e-Core’s managing director Dan Teixeira will be covering all the major insights on July 17, 11:00 am ET.

You can register here.