Series: Contact center enablement

Organize stakeholder collaboration

Collaboration helps your project team make better decisions and helps drive advocacy throughout the organization. This effort is a key way to gain support for project goals and ensure alignment to your mission and strategy.

Collaboration is critical to implementing new technology because the configuration must attend to needs across the organization and support a wide range of processes and goals. At different phases of the project, involve different project stakeholders from across the business. It is an art and science to manage team members to work together collaboratively.

Ensure that your core team members meet regularly, and that they quickly establish shared working norms and expectations. Solicit and incorporate input from a wide variety of stakeholders in addition to core team members. It is not imperative that every project stakeholder attends every meeting and contribute to every decision. However, it is important that they communicate throughout the project to discuss future milestones and to contribute their unique perspectives about project decisions.

It can be tempting to limit the number of people who have input in the design of the service. Lengthy conversations and multiple layers of decisions slow down progress. The benefit of soliciting stakeholder input at all levels of the organization outweighs the inconvenience of including various people affected by the project’s outcome.

Questions

Discuss the following questions with your team:

  • Is there a culture of collaboration within your organization? If yes, how can that culture drive the goals of the project? If no, how can you begin to create a more collaborative culture using this project as an opportunity to do it?
  • Have you identified a core team that spans multiple departments and roles across the organization? Do you have the right people from the business? Do they understand the workflow? Can they contribute a vision of the desired customer experience and the optimal workflow?
  • Have you gained the agreement and buy-in of end users in IT, the contact center, and the business that is administering and using Genesys Cloud? Do those stakeholders understand that their input and collaboration is an important part of the implementation process and the success of the project?
  • What are opportunities to create collaboration into the project timeline and milestones? How can you make sure that all stakeholders have the opportunity to share their viewpoints?

Actions

Take the following actions before moving forward:

Preparation Assigned to Complete date

During internal and vendor project team meetings, clearly define:

  • What you mean by internal and external stakeholder collaboration.
  • What you hope to accomplish by establishing collaborative working relationships.
  • How you expect the project team and users to work collaboratively.
Bring all project stakeholders together regularly to revisit project strategy and planning. Ensure that the stakeholders communicate progress, milestones, barriers, and resolved outstanding concerns. Actively solicit team member participation and input.
Record all meetings, topics of discussion, and decisions. Use a common portal or email distribution to organize project documents and meeting minutes, and provide all stakeholders with insight about project planning and decision making.
Create opportunities for project teams to collaborate, remove siloes where possible, and coach team members to extend their inclusion and collaboration skills. Recognize and reward collaboration.
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