Holistic vs compartimantelised view

Silo mentality
Silo mentality

Silo Mentality occurs when various stakeholders do NOT coordinate well their activities with their peers and other work-groups. People with silo-mindset are not aware and do NOT understand the "BIG picture" and their part in the success of the organisation as a whole.
Good organization must create a unified vision and motivate with incentives all involved to work towards achieving a common goal.
Silo mentality is so common that it is assumed to be a fundamental problem of human nature. However, some organisations are far more successful than others in eliminating silo-mindset than others. This suggests there are things about the way an organisation operates that either encourages or discourages this mindset.

A silo mentality reduces efficiency and can be a contributing factor to a failure.

Often, most fine experts are just controlled puppets, they never get the full information, just enough to keep them working hard for the organization/system. Their controllers and planners in upper management think that hierarchical compartmentalization and silo-mentality is good for the system. Or worse - controllers and planners do not think at all.

Five things must occur to help break down silos and increase collaboration:
1. Managers and all other controlling entities must ensure that information and awareness of the project status flows across work-groups and within departments as well as among all various stakeholders -- so early alarm may occur before it is too late - so, quality and work-in-progress can be monitored in each moment.
2. Priorities need to be aligned— and well orchestrated.
3. Decision making should be coordinated across silos.

4. Create a multidisciplinary-joint team that looks across the organisation composed of skilled leaders with credibility to identify opportunities and drive change, and monitor progress.

5. Good manager should find examples and counter-examples — where cooperation between departments led to success (to be followed) and to failure (to be avoided)

The goal in breaking-down silos is not to destroy a department’s autonomy, but rather to eliminate the issues that caused conflicting priorities, lack of information flow, and duplication of efforts and resources.
ONE MUST KNOW UPFRONT: what is his duty and what is NOT his concern, what is and what is not his responsibility, but also must be awake to create warnings whenever is needed and before the situation is out of control. REWARDS should be given to such individuals, and their merit recognized and not ignored.

Often many departments of an organization are working on the same thing creating complete waste and chaos.

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Compartmentalized solutions and lack of big-picture vision
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To have holistic and big-picture view of the whole is an important strategic priority.
Unified focus, should be applied across teams to encourage collaboration, control of compatibility and convergence of separated parts, team work and ultimately accomplishment of the common goal.
A unified leadership team should encourage trust, coordination, and break managers out of the “my department” silo-mentality and move into the “Unified Vision - Common Goal” mentality.
Many times there are multiple tactical goals and objectives successfully accomplished, but the top priority strategic goal has failed - because of lack of holistic approach and coordination.


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Silos - occurrence reasons
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Silos typically occur because of compartmentalized organization structure. Managers are responsible for one specific department within an organization and each manager has different, sometimes contrasting priorities, responsibilities and vision. Often, managers are not aware of the priorities and goals of stakeholders and there is little communication, collaboration and no coordinated teamwork.

A silo mentality or silo organization may be the cause that big organizations cannot cope well with the present mega trends. Silo mentality department of an organization has its own way of collecting, developing, sharing and exchanging information.. without a big picture view.

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Work Towards Achieving a Common Goal
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Once the leadership team has agreed to the over-arching unified vision of the organization, it is important that this team determines underlying root problems that may be causing the ripple effect of silos, among different work-groups which should work towards achieving a Common Goal.
Many times there are multiple tactical goals and objectives well identified, but it is up to the Leadership team to remain on task and define the single, qualitative focus that is shared among them as the top priority - the Big Picture - FINAL RESULT.

Notify upper management of any deficiencies in the quality system and monitor required corrective actions.

The quality assurance team shall have direct access to the highest level of management at which decisions are made on policy or resources, as well as to the technical director(s). The quality assurance officer shall fulfill his functions independently from operations for which he maintains quality assurance oversight.


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Japanese and the western mentality
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In Japan quality ensuring team and the programmers form one unit. There is a difference between the Japanese and the western mentality. Our society hopes to improve by compartmentalised-silo activity, whereas the eastern has a more holistic view. Each and every one feels responsible for the whole company and not so much for his own segment of work in particular.


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Particularly interesting would be to explore the line which brings a distinction between a design choice and implementation detail. It would be nice to know when we can be pretty sure to claim: IT IS NOT A DESIGN CHOICE, IT IS "JUST" AN IMPLEMENTATION DETAIL.

This seems to me to be the crux of software craftsmanship.

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What tasks constitute _architecture_ in your opinion?
What constitutes _design_?
What constitutes _implementation_?
Where are the concrete boundaries between these activities?

In producing an actual program, we realize that we will discover mistakes that someone might think of as being in architecture, design, implementation.
As such, if we are good enough to be able to correct for inevitable mistakes at any level, at any time, our system will work better than if we are not able to do that.
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Hologram vs. Silo
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From my experience, it’s a paradigm shift in consciousness that needs to come to people before they see the connection - click. A change in the mindset. A whole new bird-view perspective. In many businesses, upper managers struggle with effectiveness and focus on the details of the business that are dysfunctional, rather than see the whole big picture.


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The Blame Culture
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Any problems can occur in every type of organisation. When things start going wrong, the problems can quickly create what has become known as a Blame Culture. Everyone is eager to ensure that someone else is blamed. Quick fixes are made without thinking through the consequences.
This mixture of perceptions can often help to deepen a culture of resistance and mistrust. Work becomes stressful, frustrating and far less satisfying and productive than it potentially could be.
Quality assurance (QA) is a way of preventing mistakes or defects in manufactured products and avoiding problems when delivering solutions or services. Quality assurance responsibilities must be clearly defined - upfront.

If/when something went wrong, incompetent bully manager asks "Who is to blame". So, problems were never really addressed or solved.

The opposite of a blame culture is a problem solving culture. In a problem solving culture people feel able to offer solutions, highlight problems, put suggestions forward. When something goes wrong, the question is "How did that happen and what can we do about it to fix it?"