Knowledge Base · Pitfalls
How do silos kill improvement, and how do I break them down?
Silos kill improvement because a customer's journey crosses departments, while improvement work stays inside them. Chapter 7 warns that each department can become its own kingdom, producing local gains that create a bottleneck somewhere else. Break silos down by looking at the process end to end, across departments, instead of optimising one part at a time.
Processes do not care about your org chart. One customer's journey might pass through marketing, then sales, then operations, then billing. Each of those departments, though, often runs as its own independent kingdom, with priorities and measures of its own.
When improvement is confined inside those walls, the result is local optimisation. One department becomes more efficient, but the larger cross functional problem stays untouched, and the gain may come at the expense of the next department, which inherits a bottleneck it did not create.
The chapter's remedy is perspective before projects. Look at the process as a whole, from start to finish, following the work as the customer experiences it rather than as the chart divides it. That view shows where handoffs, waits, and rework actually sit.
Its audit question is the practical test: do we collaborate across departments to solve problems? If the honest answer is no, start there. Bring the departments that touch the same process into the same problem, rather than asking each one to improve its own slice in isolation.
Related questions
- What is process mapping, and how do I map a process?
- What is a SIPOC, and how do I build one?
- What is the voice of the customer, and how do I capture it?
Source: Continuous Improvement in the Workplace, Ch. 7 (Pitfalls to Avoid in CI Initiatives).