Can you explain your process for holding stakeholders accountable and ensuring they fulfill their obligations?

Question

Anonymous · Accepted 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

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

Can you explain your process for holding stakeholders accountable and ensuring they fulfill their obligations?

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