Even the strongest individual teams can struggle when their processes don’t align with the broader system. When Product, Development, QA, DevOps, or Infrastructure each operate with their own rules, rituals, and priorities, work doesn’t flow—it ricochets.
Silos create invisible friction. One team finishes their part and “throws it over the wall.” Another team picks it up—eventually. Meanwhile, everyone believes they’re doing the right thing because their part of the process is optimized. But the SDLC doesn’t reward local optimization. It rewards end-to-end flow.
When teams or individuals adopt a “not my job” mindset, the system becomes fragmented. The real objective—shipping high-quality software efficiently—gets replaced with meeting local goals or protecting local boundaries.
A Common Example
A development team completes a feature on Thursday afternoon. Their definition of done means “code written and merged.” QA, however, doesn’t pull new work until the next morning’s triage meeting. DevOps won’t deploy test environments after lunchtime due to stability rules. Nobody is wrong individually, but the system is now stuck.
Development thinks QA is slow.
QA thinks DevOps is inflexible.
DevOps thinks Development dumped work late.
And the business wonders why features take so long.
Each team optimizes inside its own silo—yet the combined process drags. A task that took a developer four hours now takes the organization four days because it traveled through three disconnected processes.
Symptoms
- Work sits idle between teams
- “Who owns this?” becomes a weekly question
- Longer cycle times with no obvious cause
- Teams blame upstream or downstream partners
- Finger-pointing replaces collaboration
These bottlenecks are part of a larger pattern we see across the software lifecycle. On the Iter8 homepage, we outline the most common SDLC bottlenecks and how we approach them.
Why It Matters
Handoffs are one of the largest sources of delay in any SDLC. Each one introduces waiting, context switching, and confusion. The more specialized the teams—and the more rigid their boundaries—the more bottlenecks multiply.
Silos create bottlenecks not through incompetence, but through misalignment.
The Iter8 Approach
We help teams step back from local processes and look at the SDLC as a continuous system.
Our approach focuses on:
- Mapping the full value stream to make hidden delays visible
- Realigning teams around shared objectives instead of isolated tasks
- Reducing unnecessary handoffs
- Adding lightweight feedback loops between teams each iteration
When teams stop optimizing in isolation and start optimizing the flow together, the entire system accelerates.
