Nobody was measured on working together

The dilemma underneath the brief

The framing was the familiar one. Keep improving what exists while also building what is next, and do both without letting either starve. Knowledge sharing between the two organisations was identified as the lever, because the internal network organisation is the fastest, cheapest place to test what the commercial software organisation builds.

The two sit on different platforms, hold different goals and answer to different measures. One is measured on international sales. The other is measured on operating cost and network quality in a single country. That is not a communication problem.

The work was structured in four phases across ten weeks. Background research, then interviews, then a validation survey, then recommendations.

What people actually said

Asked directly whether their key performance indicators or incentives supported collaboration, 65 per cent said not at all, 35 per cent said indirectly and nobody said directly. Many could not recall their explicit goals at all, particularly on the network side where goals are set at team level.

The clearest agreement in the whole study was on the cheapest intervention. 93 per cent said that simply seeing what the other team is working on and what it is targeting would help them collaborate more. That was the highest score anywhere in the survey.

The teams valued each other asymmetrically. 85 per cent of the software side rated the network side work as very important. Only 37 per cent of the network side said the same in return, and many of those answers described not knowing what the other team does rather than judging it. That coding was ours, drawn from open answers, not a scale respondents picked from.

The platform question was not the platform question

Two thirds of interviewees named the separate platforms as a challenge. Only a quarter actually wanted them merged. A third preferred them separate and the rest were undecided for now.

The reasons against merging were specific rather than defensive: genuinely different development needs, distrust in how work would be prioritised if one team gave up control, and the transition cost.

So the recommendation was not to merge anything. It was to decide the future platform intention and say so, because uncertainty about it was producing duplicate work and a reluctance to commit to joint projects. Knowing the answer mattered more than the answer.

What they would accept, and what they would not

Employees were asked not only what would help but what they would personally do, and the gap between those two is where most change programmes die.

Cross functional workshops scored highest as an activity, at 4.23 out of 5, with joint project work just behind at 4.15. 92 per cent thought workshops and informal activities would enable more collaboration, and 77 to 85 per cent said they would personally take part.

Job rotation divided them. Around two thirds thought it could work. Fewer than half would join one. The recommendation therefore made it voluntary rather than mandating it, which is a smaller programme and a real one.

On rewards the answer was unambiguous. Project based one time bonuses when a milestone is reached scored 76 per cent. Making the existing bonus system quarterly scored 32 per cent, the lowest of everything tested. And on measurement they rejected the obvious metric outright: counting joint meetings scored 23 per cent, the least relevant thing anyone could measure.

The recommendation, ordered by effort

The recommendations were placed on an impact and effort grid rather than in a list, which forced the sequencing.

High impact and small effort came first: cross functional workshops, and explicit high level encouragement so that priority conflicts get resolved above the people caught in them. Then the low hanging fruit, informal events, a shared communication channel, and publishing both teams targets openly.

Highest impact but real effort sat with joint projects and project based rewards, and those went into a second horizon. Structural and cultural change went into a third. The one item explicitly parked was making the bonus system quarterly, which employees did not want and which would have cost the most to build.

What this study can carry, and what it cannot

Thirteen survey responses from twenty four invited, over three days, plus fourteen employee interviews and three with management. On a base of thirteen, one respondent moves any percentage by about seven and a half points. Every figure on this page should be read as what employees said, not as what changed.

There is no measured result in this engagement. Nothing had been implemented at handover, no metric moved, and the key performance indicators proposed were labelled potential in the deck and are labelled potential here.

What it produced was a diagnosis specific enough to act on, and one finding that cost nothing to fix. The single most agreed intervention, at 93 per cent, was to let each team see the other team targets.