People:removing roadblocks to productivity/project reinventing the wheel

Reinventing The Wheel

Project manager: Mihca Anderson

How to get involved

What we heard

There's a lack of visibility and coordination among teams that inevitably creates silos and causes teams to reinvent the wheel. It's highly inefficient, slows us down, and doesn't allow for visibility of Mozillians across the org.

Shorter term actions

These are things we expect to accomplish in 2014.

• Work in progress: create a place to make skills/expertise visible across the project >> mozillians.org and Phonebook bios are partial attempts to share this.
• Work in progress: TRIBE sessions are introducing Mozillians to each other, helping bridge gaps across teams, and building trust slowly.

Longer term changes / shifts

These are things we expect will take time, influence, and repetition to shift.

Lack of trust, lack of knowledge of what the other hand is doing (visibility), and a need to move fast mean silos get created (often intentionally). Largely systemic and comes from the top.

Responses in this category

• No visibility of skills and experiences between teams. We re-invent the wheel in our own silos because we don't know if a neighboring team has skills and experiences that could help. We need domain-based transversal group, that can share things. 44 votes
• So many silos; so many groups architecting projects without coordinating or communicating a common goals let alone a common operational architecture between them. We have such an amazing team, imagine what we could build if we coordinated better. 26 votes
• Lack of communication/cooperation across teams or lack of inter-disciplinary teams. 17 votes
• Lack of visibility into what some teams are working on and the relative priority of their work. 4 votes