Establish Accountability - Create structures that make information sharing the default
We have talked about the importance of information-sharing and how some people will struggle to make that transition from holding information close to their chests to sharing it freely. You need to help create an environment that promotes, heck, demands this. For example, before you start a project, you should mandate that a project success document is completed and agreed to. A project success document simply defines what the project’s scope is, and outlines what good looks like. Then both customer and IT stakeholders sign off on this. Now think about it; people have to talk before they can write such a document. They either need to build consensus or ask people to sign a blank piece of paper. Would you sign a blank piece of paper regarding project success? By raising the bar on your team, you hold them accountable to new standards. The goal should be that the team members challenge each other if they have not met the gating criteria before moving forward. People will normally do what they please, unless you provide them a compelling reason not to. So make sure that the default starting point for all new projects has information-sharing tenets built into them. Maybe it’s not a project success document, but a centralized document repository. We all collect and process information differently, so you must make it freely and universally available to your team so they can mine, decipher and shape their ideas, fueled with the best information you can provide them.
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