Find Simple Solutions to the Feedback You are Receiving
By: Rose Day
Tags: Life Lessons, Leadership, Leading Women In Data, Lessons Learned, Data Science

Breaking the Silo

When talking with the team about how they felt siloed, I learned it was a person by person difference. Not everyone felt they were siloed, but those who did needed more help to feel connected to the broader team. Looking at this situation, I approached the problem with two fundamental changes:

Inviting members to meetings that interest them. Creating sprint summaries of what I am learning in my meetings and emails with the broader team.

The first change was more straightforward. I have a good understanding of my team’s interests, and if I am unsure, I will ask them. Knowing what they want to be involved in, I can add them into meetings with the broader team aligned with their interests. I can also connect them with individuals who are working on projects they may want to be included in. For some members, this has not been necessary as they reach out to others to be included. Others need the extra push to become more involved in the broader team.

For the second change, I began to create sprint summaries for the team to review with them in our team meetings. During the sprint, I attend many meetings and often take notes. These meetings are with many different teams on planning, project updates, and more. Thinking of this, I decided to make a OneNote notebook that is shared with my group. This notebook contains all my meeting notes along with sprint summaries. These summaries detail out a few different vital topics that have occurred that sprint:

⭐ Important Information and Action Items — Important information are topics of high interest to someone on the team based on projects they are working on. Action items are tasks or deadlines for my team that need to be addressed. If the item has been placed into the backlog, it will link to that user story or feature for reference.

— Important information are topics of high interest to someone on the team based on projects they are working on. Action items are tasks or deadlines for my team that need to be addressed. If the item has been placed into the backlog, it will link to that user story or feature for reference. ❓ Questions and Answers — This topic is self-explanatory, but these are questions others may have had that I sought answers to or unanswered questions from meetings.

— This topic is self-explanatory, but these are questions others may have had that I sought answers to or unanswered questions from meetings. 📘 Notes — Topics in the summary that have associated notes from meetings I attended. Not every topic or every discussion will have notes. The ones that do will be tagged with this symbol and then link to the correct OneNote page with the meeting info and notes.

— Topics in the summary that have associated notes from meetings I attended. Not every topic or every discussion will have notes. The ones that do will be tagged with this symbol and then link to the correct OneNote page with the meeting info and notes. 💡 Concepts and Ideas — These are exploratory concepts or ideas brought up in meetings that we may want to investigate later.

Both changes are relatively small and require only 15 minutes in a week to organize my notes and include or connect individuals to projects and work they are interested in. Creating these summaries gave me an excellent topic to quickly cover during our team meetings to flow down information. So far, I have received positive feedback that these two changes have helped people feel less siloed as they have more view into what is going on.