What best practices have your IT department found for strategic business stakeholder engagement? How do other departments like to hear from IT (ex. QBRs, monthly reports, collaboration channels, etc)? What do other departments like to hear about from IT in order to facilitate transparent collaboration around strategic portfolio management?

Hello, we hold regular meetings to monitor projects, we have also set up collaboration channels via team and finally we have dashboards and performance indicators. We also encourage feedback and continuous improvement supported by training and detailed documentation of our projects all contribute to improving our engagement practices.

An ongoing dialogue, with or without a Technology Business Partner has been most effective in my experience.

You asked the right question, I think. This is really about “engagement”. In my experience, we create the greatest value - and have the most fun - when we create deep partnerships built upon shared goals. Those partnerships are best anchored in an intentional scheme of collaboration that’s built into the operating model. Three things must be present:

1) Teams that have the right commitment and active participation from those stakeholders

2) Agreed upon decision-making frameworks, likely including something like OKRs that create clarity in what matters and how we think we can achieve it.

3) A way of measuring performance that can serve as a way of clarifying progress and fostering collaboration on the mutual interests.

Some organizations fall for the trap of believing we can “communicate” our way into satisfied stakeholders. I really think that satisfaction and excellence comes from partnership and “engagement”

From my experience the best way are regular communication using communications channels and periodic reports (we prepare them quarterly). In reports we expose major activities, achievements, eventual incidents/longer outages and status of ongoing projects in IT. Regarding strategic portfolio we analyze business and strategic priorities of company and then prepare potential projects (we did this once per year during company planning process for next year). Approval of selected projects is at the end done by management board and then necessary resources for this projects become part of IT budget and necessary resources for next year.

There are many ways collaborating with business stakeholders and other departments, including regular meetings, roadshows, monthly and quarterly business and operations review (including IT operations and delivery), collaboration during agile scrum projects, and so on. The key topics around strategic portfolio management are around priority alignment based on business outcome, resource planning, pain points from both IT side and business stakeholder side, partnership and opportunities to address common roadblocks, and so on.