Monday, March 28, 2016

Making collaboration across functions a reality
By Ruben Schaubroeck, Felicita Holsztejn Tarczewski, and Rob Theunissen

http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/making-collaboration-across-functions-a-reality?cid=orgfuture-eml-alt-mkq-mck-oth-1603


Great, great insight on overcoming silos
Companies have long struggled to break down silos and boost cross-functional collaboration—but the challenge is getting more acute. The speed of market change requires a more rapid adaptation of products and services, while customers increasingly expect an organization to present them with a single face. Even well-established multinationals routinely fail to manage operations end to end.The result: interactions with customers are sluggish; complex, customized products are hard to create on time and on budget; and blocked lines of communication make new sales and distribution channels difficult to navigate. 
The basic principles for improving performance—imposing stretch targets from the center, empowering cross-functional teams, standardizing processes, tightening up execution—are mostly familiar. But making these things happen is a different matter. In many companies, ownership of processes and information is fragmented and zealously guarded, roles are designed around parochial requirements, and the resulting internal complexity hinders sorely needed cross-business collaboration. What’s more, in our experience, companies that apply traditional solutions (such as lean and business-process reengineering) either exhaust their managers with efforts to rework every process across business units or, by contrast, focus too narrowly within functions... 
..a top- down op-down redesign of the company’s operating model is proposed to overcome silos:









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