How do you hold your stakeholders accountable and ensure they are meeting their obligations?

Question

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

The process starts with ensuring everyone involved have a shared understanding
of the problem, lines of ownership and expectation in term of the deliverables
that includes the plan, dates etc. For example, the launch project manager needs
to ensure they develop the end to end schedule of the project while each of the
functional managers own the plan for their groups and working with the launch
project manager to fit those into overall schedule. The critical thing to check
for is to make sure the dependencies are correctly identified and risks fully
understood. Through weekly project check-in with cross functional stakeholders,
i ensure the pieces that my team is dependent on to make progress are delivered
on time and includes the details that were identified. Any new information that
was earlier not available is discussed and the timelines are assessed and
changes agreed upon. I also take feedback from my team members on their
communication with the stakeholders to check if any unreasonable out of band
requests are being made that derails the current path and communicate any
discrepancies back to the stakeholders to set the right expectations.

Anonymous · Answer

For a project, I first identify the stakeholders like product manager, tech
lead, partner teams and their POC, Consultant/Architect, reviewers, etc. A
shared project document is created to outline the roles and responsibilities of
the stakeholders. This document also has the OKRs as well as rough timelines. I
get the consensus on the project document to kick-off the project. I also create
Slack/Teams channel for the project and add all the stakeholders to have
transparency (which also adds accountability) to the project
Based on the responsibilities for my team, I work with tech leads and PMs to
create a tracker for deliverables and tasks (I use Kanban when possible). This
builds accountability through process.
Regular sync with key XFn stakeholders like PMs, partner team POC/manager,
Consultant earns trusts, creates a tighter feedback loop and identifies the
blockers. These can be group meeting or 1:1s. This also gives opportunities to
resolve conflicts or escalate in timely manager.
I report status to leadership through MBR/QBRs. I celebrate milestones through
public announcements and shared demos at org level along with partners.

Anonymous · Answer

Holding stakeholders accountable is very important and normally it's done
through aligning on goals and delivery dates.
We had a legacy Toll-Free Number verification process done through emails. We
will receive a reply for rejected toll-free numbers and that had to be checked
manually by someone. The external partner now had an API endpoint we could
integrate with and we wanted to migrate to the API based verification. When
manual work was done and there were rejections, our stakeholders also had to do
some work to correct information and resubmit for verifications. We talked to
our stakeholders and they agreed to move to the API-based system. We had to make
sure they would also integrate with our infrastructure once we had done our
work. We identified how much work and effort is required for each team and when
teams will have time to work on this. After aligning on the timeline and the
goal of moving to API based system to get back engineering time spent on manual
work, we started executing project delivery. We had a document for the project
that I put together which clarified stakeholders and set clear expectations. We
used Jira to track the progress. To ensure stakeholders are held accountable
beyond just the initial documentation, we had a weekly check-in on progress and
documented our progress on the document we wrote. To make sure stakeholders are
engaged, we created our projected dedicated Slack channel and had continuous
discussions and conversations around any problems or questions.
Also want to note that any conflict resolution or managing delays is also an
important aspect. When a delay happens, people need to be transparent and
upfront about the delay and communicate it as early as possible so we can work
together to address the issue. A conflict should be resovled through a root
cause analysis and agreeing on a solution to move forward.
Once we had done our work, our stakeholders already had an engineer ready to
work on the integration and it was done quickly. We rolled out the change to
production and reduced our time spent on manual work from 2 hours combined for
both teams down to about 15 minutes combined.

Anonymous · Answer

I usually make sure to have combined stakeholder meetings for project to review
obligations and dependency and be prompt in calling out and tracking any
issues/risks/gaps. Have seperate deep dive meetings in a small setting to
understand any issues, impact and have measurable and actionable next steps to
achieve the goal. Escalate to higher management if there are any conflicts that
couldn't be resolved at my level.

Anonymous · Answer

At Auctane, I followed a structured process to ensure alignment - I would
initial have date for date, and followed up with an email for alignment. I would
also send a weekly status report for the leadership highlinting the project
status and identifying any risks associated and how I am working on mitigating
that risks.
 For eg. in one of our projects we had a external dependencies on UPS for a new
API version - our PM was working with them and the delays on their end had
impact for us - the project would have been delayed by a month.
I communicated with the leadership team on the risks and the plan i have to
mititgate this risk. I had a join stakeholder meeting with the UPS team and my
PM. We could identify parts of the API which we could work on while they are
working on thier issues - by working out a parallel path - I could reduce the
risk and deliver the project on time.
By being proactive and collobrating with the stakeholders I could deliver the
project on time.

Anonymous · Answer

I followed the following process. I ensured that I had, initially I had a date
for a date, that is for them to deliver by a certain date. And I would follow up
with that in an email so that the communication is clear and we both are on the
same page. I also had a weekly status meeting on a status report, which would
spell out where the project is and what are the blockers, if there are, and any
risks which are associated with it. For example, we had to integrate a certain
feature with UPS and we were dependent on the APIs being delivered by them, a
new version of the API being delivered by UPS. And our product owner was working
with the UPS team. So in order to make sure that everybody is on the same page,
I had a weekly status report. I worked with the product manager to make sure
that we are on the same page on the risks associated with this and how we should
be able to deliver this project going forward. And once we once we knew the
risks, I had my product manager on call with the stakeholders of UPS. And I
asked them to give us a date so that we can go forward with our stories. And by
exploring other alternatives, our product manager, you know, came up with the
stories, which from which we can start the development in parallel. Hence, by
doing so, I could reduce the risk. So this was communicated to the leadership
team, and we had a status report and as well as the bi-weekly leadership
meeting, which we had at Octane. By doing so, I could avoid any unnecessary
delays and reduce the risk.

Anonymous · Answer

The key here is setting the right expectations with stakeholders on their
obligations, and having documented in a meeting note or project spec note.  Have
an alignment on delivery date and the scope of feature delivery. Keep the
discussions documented and share the doc with the stakeholders so they won't
forget the conclusion.
Also importantly, check in with stakeholders on the progress in a cadence that
would be reasonable. This not only holds the stakeholders accountable and
reminding them about their obligations, if they cannot fulfill their obligations
for whatever reason which happens in real world, checking in periodically will
allow me to make whatever changes on my end in advance.

Anonymous · Answer

Meetings, communication channels, RACI graph, documentation

Project Document - add information about the stakeholders. Add RACI chart into
the plan covering the roles of all the stakeholders about the responsibility,
accountability, consulted, informed
Recurring meeting  - Depending on the influence and criticality of a stakeholder
I setup meetings with different cadence to track the obligations and ask for
timely inputs through variuos communication channels like email, group
messaging, 1:1 meetings, standups etc
Escalating - if there is impact on the project delivery

How do you hold your stakeholders accountable and ensure they are meeting their obligations?

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