Communicate with Stakeholders More Effectively

Contributed by Charles Humble

Difficulty level: Intermediate

As you become more senior during your career, more of your time will likely be spent communicating with stakeholders—and while it can be hard to accept, they rarely care about technology. What they do care about is outcomes.

Trust and transparency are essential to successful communication, but we’ve gotten very used to referring to IT and “The Business” as if they were two separate entities. This is unhelpful, not only because it sets up division, but also because it means you can lose sight of who your customer is.

As a senior IT person, understanding the business is every bit as essential as understanding technology, since it allows you to talk to your stakeholders as equals. You will both have knowledge that the other lacks, but at least you can have a common language and a baseline of understanding. Time spent acquiring this knowledge is never wasted.

Learn to listen and to ask questions. If something doesn’t make sense or you are not sure about a detail, ask.

If you need to make a case for doing something, you have to be able to express it in business terms. As an example, IT people think technical debt is a useful metaphor for helping business people understand something, even though many of us don’t really know what the term means and use it to say “getting rid of stuff I don’t like.” The term is equally meaningless to a business stakeholder. But suppose you ...