LA ISD Station 5: Goal 2

Slack? Was AI used to create these bullet points?

To foster cross-functional collaboration and reduce duplication of effort, teams should be encouraged to maintain a shared commitment to cooperation and mutual support. Clear policies and expectations should be consistently enforced to promote accountability, streamline processes, and ensure alignment across departments. By reinforcing a culture of collaboration, the County can improve operational efficiency, leverage collective expertise, and deliver more coordinated and effective services.

Encourage the Executive Team to take into consideration the teams that do work beyond LAC due to external funding and that we have to adhere to our funders as we implement programs successfully. Therefore, what improvements can be made to ensure that the units in LAC's ISD is responsive to the needs an external funder requires from LAC to meet deliverables. Sometimes it is our internal LAC ISD units that hold us back on meeting deliverables. Also, more education to upper management on how teams that are working with external funders have to work differently to meet goals. It feels like there is lack of flexibility for some staff to understand the unique needs of ISD staff the play this role.

What does "high-impact" mean?

A game changer would be for ISD to adopt a 360 evaluation review. The executive team should build out a mechanism to be evaluated.

Adding the CIO and DISO of the customer departments to the mailing list for the budget memo may foster better communication between the budget/finance management and IT management of customer departments.

Again, all great points that we at IRSD are working on. We have come out of a world of analog communication systems to the digital era. This has created a definite need for cross-collaboration. We are working to break down the silos to more effectively get work done.

I would add to set a goal post here, explicitly stating what optimal cross-functional collaboration looks like. How do we measure if we are going in that direction? The onus is on management to create that culture for their employees; managers set the tone and methodologies in place, and their employees will execute on that methodology.

While all of these points are great and work to create the foundation for collaboration, we constantly leave out the potential of adding value by helping to develop our partnering workforce. By leaving departments staff in the dark or by not empower them to do more by minimizing their access to tools that they could use to help use provide services.

I'm not clear on what "cross-functional activities" means in this context - maybe I just need some examples to figure out what's being discussed here. My best guess about how that would apply as part of a development team in ITS would be having some way of drawing on functionality developed and data managed by other teams in ITS. If that's the case, I think the first thing we need is for absolutely every team to document absolutely every piece of functionality they maintain and every type of data they control access to - the biggest limitation I've found on trying to work with other groups in that sense is knowing who (if anyone!) actually handles any particular thing.

Eliminate multiple steps to get a simple task done. To many emails, attachments, and forms with no clear direction and no assistance for new employees to grasp the concept to be confident. Clear process needs to be established internally to keep staff on board.

Yes!

I'm not clear what "ownership" means. In my mind, since much of this section is about collaboration, does ownership set a territorial tone? I'd love to see a cultivation of more joint leadership and breaking down silos (we do this in EES, I would say). Hierarchy ought not to be our friend.

This would be a game changer!