Communicating And Influencing Flashcards
I engaged with the senior stakeholders, who were non-technical, to understand what it is they required to develop their strategy. I quickly came to realize that….
…. the specifications and requirements were vague.
I continued to discuss the different elements of the problem and I was able to identify an opportunity for my team to undertake a project using natural language processing to provide the vital information they needed to inform their strategy.
As the stakeholder was non-technical, I ensured that when explaining natural language processing, I focussed on the possible output of the analysis, rather than…..
getting into the technical details of the implementation. For example, when explaining topic modeling I steered clear of going into the details of the algorithm or the use of python but instead focussed on the insights that topic modelling can surface from a large corpus of text, to help inform their strategy.
With this understanding, they agreed on the project.
In order to gain buy-in and to motivate the members of my team, I positioned the project as an exciting opportunity…
…. to go above and beyond for an influential stakeholder in an area which has not been explored before. I explained that the successful delivery of this project would lead to increased exposure and recognition.
I was able to influence buy-in from my team
- I identified two barriers to collaboration within my team, which I needed to address for successful project collaboration:
- The fact the team was spread across time zones.
- The fact that the time was multidisciplinary and had a mix of skills.
- I established a dedicated Microsoft Teams channel for project communication, facilitating virtual collaboration.
- I organized stand-ups and weekly sprint meetings at agreed-upon times within working hours.
- I utilized Microsoft Teams Planner for task allocation and project planning, incorporating Kanban and Project Planning functionalities.
- I implemented Agile Project Management, dividing the project into weekly sprints, with clearly defined tasks, allocated to specific team members, to be delivered by a certain deadline.
- When I allocated tasks between the team members, I took time to understand the skills and capabilities of each team member, to agree which roles they would be best suited to undertake and I allocated the tasks as such.
- I encouraged team members to raise issues in the Teams channel and when necessary, I held additional meetings to discuss progress and blockers.
- I leveraged these digital tools to enable asynchronous communication, which complemented organized meetings.
- I reviewed progress after each sprint, reflected with team members, and empowered them to explore new opportunities.
- I presented a Proof of Concept to the customer, receiving positive and critical feedback.
- I adapted to feedback by prioritizing necessary changes within an additional sprint to deliver the product effectively.
- One of the agreed outputs of the project was a dashboard of the insights for the stakeholder.
- When I reviewed the draft dashboard that a member of my team had put together to present to the stakeholder, I judged that it was overly technical, containing complex visualisations which the stakeholder would not understand.
- I realised that my communication of this fact to my team members had not been clear and that I had to re communicate this and convince the team member to redo the dashboard in a more user friendly manner
- This was a difficult message to deliver as the team member had dedicated a lot of time and effort in to producing the dashboard and I was conscious that delivering this message in the wrong way could be very demoralising and demotivating.
- I approached this with clarity and sensitivity by making my feedback as specific as possible, using examples that got at the why, so that is was easier for him to understand what I meant.
- I clarified what success looked and would feel like, as to give him a clear picture of what the end product should look like.
- To ensure that the feedback was translated in to action but not to dictate what should have next, empowered him to share what he thought the next steps should be and let him guide the conversation. I provided gentle coaching where I thought he was going off track.
- He took the feedback onboard and re did the dashboard, which was now suitably targeted to the audience level.
When the Tableau Dashboard output was to be presented to the senior management, I brought all of the team to ensure full credit was given to every member.
The stakeholder was able to understand the insights from the analysis, which became a key component of informing what programmes that should be rolled out to employees for learning and development.
