Waterfall, silos and accessing new knowledge

When it comes to Agile approaches, sharing lessons learned and applying new knowledge and information within iterations, to the next iteration cycle, and to the next project, is a way of life. I’ve not found, however, why doing this within Agile works better than traditional project approaches like Warterfall. The answer came to me while examining research on how information passes into social and professional networks by Sinan Aral, Erik Brynjolfsson, and Marshall Van Alstyne [1] for a post on The AppGap.

Silos tend to have homogeneous networks. We see this with anecdotes like Kevin Bacon and his 6-degrees of separation with other Holywood actors. As such, given any actor, you’re only 6-steps away from someone else and therefore only 6-steps away from (new) information. But this uniformity or homogeneity  means that when information exists outside the network it can be difficult, if not impossible to access.

Applied to organisations whose business lines are heavily siloed, their networks become homogenous and, as a result, new information is very difficult to access. While new information is accessible through formalised process, it tends to be slow moving because, in relation to the waterfall project management process for example, only official, formalised, signed-off, complete, and comprehensive documentation tends to be communicated between silos.

In order for new information to be incorporated into silos, and work practices changed and improved, it has to pass along official communication lines.

Ultimately, I think this is why lessons learned are often so difficult to incorporate into waterfall projects — it can’t be easily applied because change has to transverse silos typically controlled by the organisations bureaucracy. An important issue to note is that even if new information is introduced into one silo there is no method for the information to also be introduced into other silos.

So is an Agile approach any better? I’ll explore this question in the next post.

M

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1. Aral, S., Brynjolfsson, E. Marshall Van Alstyne, E. M., 2006. Network Structure & Information Advantage: Structural Determinants of Access to Novel Information. Workshop on Information Systems Economics.

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