8# - 3 ways to improve the relationship with your internal customers/stakeholders (2/2)

and why you should care about it more than you think

Dec 28, 2024

Reading time: 9 minutes

Hi there,

Here is Francesco Marino from “Better at Data”.

🍾Let me first wish you a wonderful 2025!🍾
I sincerely hope that 2025 will be simply an extremely happy year for you.

Let’s start!
What if improving your relationships with internal stakeholders could not only make your job easier but also multiply your team's impact?

Today we will see the second part of this article. So if you haven’t read the first part yet, it is the right moment to do so!

7# - 3 ways to improve the relationship with your internal customers/stakeholders (1/2)

Francesco Marino

December 4, 2024

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In the latest article, I shared the first way that helped me (and that can help you) to improve the relationship with your customers: knowing them deeply. Today we will see 2 other ways.

3 ways to improve the relationship with your customers

1 - Know your customers:

I wrote about it in this section of the previous article: Know your customers

2 - Constant, open communication and a frequent feedback cycle

For me, having a constant and open communication with my customers was critical to know them and to build a trusted relationship.

This also gave my customers the feeling that there was someone ready to help.

What does “constant and open communication” mean in practice? There are different ways to do it and this is just what worked for me.

🤝Having recurrent 1:1 with the main stakeholders/users

I was using these meetings, once every 2 weeks in my case, to:

Ask them direct questions about their priorities, their opinions and possible suggestions.
Ask them how it was going with the rest of the team and if I could help them with something.
Have an open communication when I was thinking that the relationship was not going in the right direction for any XYZ reason and that I needed something from them to make it work.
Understand if there was something easy I could do outside my specific responsibilities to help them: a contact from another team, a technical issue they could not solve or something else.

In summary, I used this space to have honest (and sometimes difficult) conversations, build authentic relationships, and sincerely help where I could.

📩Sprint start and sprint end recap emails

Today, many teams follow agile methodologies and work in sprints. Since we noticed that some transparency about our work was missing with our stakeholders, we decided to send a recap email at the beginning and at the end of each sprint.

Structure of the email

Each email was structured in the same way:

Short introduction
Recap of the previous sprint:
- New business functionalities released, their business benefits and who worked on the functionality.
  We also added the released technical functionalities (those that directly benefit the IT team), such as setting up a deployment pipeline or adding test automation. We clarified also in this case the business benefits.
- Admin, support, and technical analysis tasks completed, their benefits and who did them.
- Tasks and functionalities to be done in the sprint but not completed, the reasons why they were not completed, what we would do to avoid this to happen again and the new planned timeline for completion.
Recap of the planned sprint:
- New planned functionalities to be released.
- New planned tasks to be completed or to progress on.
- Tentative release date and required user availability for the testing before the release.
Various: e.g. a new team member, a new technical certification from someone in the team, a team member working partially for another team for some time, etc…
Conclusion and request for comments and feedback

Example of email

Here is an example of a simplified email.

Hi George and Peter,

As we conclude the November sprint and kick off the next one, here's a recap of the work done in the latest sprint and the plan for the coming one.

Recap of the previous sprint:

Functionalities Released

Sales Forecast Dashboard Enhancements: Added the ability to drill-down sales amount by Customer type, Customer age, and Customer city type.
Business benefit: Easier access to granular data for decision-making.
Contributors: John D.
Deployment Pipeline Setup: Automated the release process for the reporting tool.
Business benefit: we expect to decrease the release time by 3 hours for 3 FTEs each month and to reduce the risk of errors during the release process. This was one of the main causes of delayed releases in the past 6 months.
Contributor: Laura A.

Completed Tasks

Analyzed the usage metrics of the reporting platform: we noticed that 20% of reports were not used in the last 3 months and we will come back to the report owners to understand if these are still useful and if yes, why they are not used.
Benefit: this is the initial step to perform the cleaning of the platform. This will allow us to invest more time on enhancing/creating useful reports instead of investing time in manage unused ones.
Contributor: Neha S.
Support for Regional Sales Reports: Addressed issues in data accuracy for the APAC region.
Benefit: Restored trust in data reliability.
Contributors: Team-wide effort also with the support of the data platform team

Delayed release of new functionalities

Integration with CRM for customer meetings data: Due to unexpected API changes in the data source, we had to align again with the CRM technical team to get the new API definition.
To avoid this problem in the future, we are aligning with all the data producers’ teams to ask them to inform us before making changes that can impact us.
We plan to finalize the integration by January 31st as already discussed over some previous meetings.

Planned for the Upcoming Sprint

New Functionalities

Real-time Sales Alerts: Enable notifications for key sales thresholds. Tentative release date: 15 December

Planned Tasks

Annual mandatory technical accounts reviews: this is a mandatory exercise to assess the proper rights of the technical accounts we use and to rotate passwords where required.
Analysis for integrating automatic AI-created unit test cases in our data transformations component: this analysis will help us understand if the usage of Generative Artificial Intelligence can help us reduce the development time and the quality of our releases.

Various Updates

Certifications Achieved: Congratulations to Alex T. for earning the Azure Data Engineering certification. This certification is just one evidence of the great technical skills Alex has. A great part of the 70% reduction on refresh jobs failures we achieved in the last 3 months is due to his work.
Temporary Assignment: Neha S. will support the Marketing Analytics team for two months for 50% of her time. This will reduce the amount of work our team can deliver in the next 2 months but it will accelerate the collaboration between us and the Marketing team, giving us back a good knowledge of the marketing processes. This is in alignment with the company strategic goal of having Sales and Marketing capabilities better interconnected.

Please if you have any questions or you need some specific work item to prioritize let us know

Thanks,
John D.
IT Manager – Sales Analytics

This simplified example email was created with ChatGPT and reviewed by me.

Benefits of this email structure

This email structure helps in different ways:

It provides clarity about successful releases, their business benefits and who in the team has worked on those. This last point is also useful to give the right credit to each team member that deserves it.
It provides transparency on tasks often not visible from outside the team: e.g. technical-only releases or admin tasks.
It provides transparency about planned and unfinished tasks, the reason why they were not finished, the solutions to avoid this to happen again and the new timeline. This approach helped me to put gentle pressure on me and the team to have full accountability for the delivery and for each possible process improvement.
Example:
Did we have to delay a release because the tests done were not enough? We improve the process so we have more complete tests for the next time.
Didn’t the release team want to perform the release for one component because of missing documentation? We improve our process to deliver proper documentation for the next time.
In all these cases, we might lose a bit our face for our errors, but we say sorry and we try our best not to make the same error twice. This full transparency gives also a full view about the complete ownership approach our team is using.

👂Frequent feedback cycle

Almost every occasion, from the recurrent one-to-one to the big communication call or the informal conversation, was a good opportunity to ask for feedback… in the proper way in the proper context.

I was asking for feedback about every part of the delivery process: is there a way to improve how we gather requirements? Or how we track all the new initiatives? How one specific person in the team is doing on a specific task? Or can I improve something to increase my impact? Is there something important to focus on? Do you need help on this?

Not all feedback was useful, but even then, I gained insight into what my customers and stakeholders were thinking. This knowledge was powerful in the long term.

3 - Be professional

The last way I used to improve the relationship with my customers was simply the basis of all professional relationships: always strive to be professional.

In this case for me, it means:

Complete what you promise with quality.
Be accountable not only on deliverables but also on work organization. Taking notes, reminding open topics and chasing on pending information requests are some examples.
Be honest and transparent. Mean what you say and do not lie, even in difficult conversations.
Be assertive when required. e.g. if someone is saying something incorrect that affects your team, reply with assertiveness. Often, this is important to make things clear and to build a mature professional relationship.
Be present. I do not mean that you need to be in all the meetings. I hate being in a meeting without adding any value… But it is important to be present, join the meetings when you feel potential problems can come, or just set up 1:1 with the clients and listen to them, or reply to their emails in a constructive way. It’s essential that customers feel supported.
Be product-minded and customer-oriented. Because these are two main ingredients, as an IT manager, to add value for the users of your platform.

Conclusions

In this article, we explored three key ways to improve relationships with internal customers and stakeholders:

Getting to know your customers deeply - understanding their needs, challenges, and working style.
Maintaining constant and open communication through regular 1:1s, transparent sprint updates, and active feedback cycles.
Being professional by delivering quality work, staying accountable, maintaining honesty, and remaining customer-focused.

By implementing these practices consistently, you can build stronger relationships that ultimately lead to greater impact for your team and organization.

Remember that improving stakeholder relationships is an ongoing journey that requires dedication and continuous effort. The rewards - smoother projects, better alignment, and increased team effectiveness - make it well worth the investment.

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