Breaking Silos With Guilds
Learn how making the guilds can help you increase your productivity.
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What is a guild?
Guilds are a straightforward yet powerful technique for preventing silos. A guild is a group of people who work on different teams but share a common interest or skill set. The neat thing about guilds is that they’re just a group of people with a common goal. Since it’s so easy to talk via chat and video call, you can help form guilds in your company with no top-down approach required.
You may be wondering why we’re covering guilds if they don’t need a manager to form them. The reason they’re worth covering is that they’re another useful tool for you to suggest to your staff to solve common problems, which in turn increases their confidence and autonomy. You’re also well-positioned as a manager to help connect others as guilds get off the ground. You may also want to get involved yourself!
Purpose of guilds
Guilds concern themselves with the following matters:
- Discussion and progression of best practice across an interest or discipline.
- Information sharing across multiple teams.
- Improving the visibility of that interest or discipline within the company.
For example, you could have guilds that concern themselves with the following:
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How the department uses JavaScript, like the standardization of using particular frameworks, code ownership of shared utility libraries, owning the department-wide linting configuration to ensure that code looks and feels the same regardless of the author
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Visibility and promotion of security throughout the development process
Each member of the guild brings back the best practice and knowledge to their own team and ...