At the Direct Booking Summit: Americas, Paolo Torchio, Vice President Digital and eCommerce at Two Roads Hospitality, shared his approach to reducing silo mentality at work with a combination of Kanban, Agile and Scrum methodologies. Today, we find out more about his approach to uncover how you can foster and support it in your hotel.
“We took the concepts of short sprints with focus on what can be achieved in short time frames. It's mostly about breaking things into smaller chunks of work so you don’t have long project phases, but rather faster outcomes,” says Paolo. He highlights that testing and learning from the successes and failures of these outcomes is crucial for the technique to work.
Try to:
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Keep your teams to not more than eight people from different disciplines. “Sometimes the team has to be a bit bigger, but we found that keeping it down to eight or fewer heads in the room works best for us. The larger teams tend to be less effective or a bit slower,” says Paolo.
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Include a representative from each discipline (revenue, marketing, sales, distribution, brand and others).
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Select a Scrum Master - a facilitator within the team responsible for keeping the fast pace. Paolo’s advice is to select a team member who understands the scrum process, and who will not over-index on any particular discipline.
To keep everyone’s tasks and progress transparent, Paolo recommends trying Kanban. Kanban board is used to keep team members aware of the state of their projects at any given time. Paolo’s team uses it to prioritize activities, visualize the team’s backlog and identify further actions. There are multiple Kanban board softwares designed for managing and planning tasks, such as Trello, HeySpace and Kanban Tool.
To find out more actionable team management tips from the industry’s experts at The Curtain, Nobis, Taktikon AB and EHPC, check out our article on how to get your hotel's marketing and revenue teams to collaborate.
