On our last blog post we explored the importance of implementing a high-integrity commitment process alongside the development cycle.
But how does this process work in practice? This post addresses the challenges of implementing a high-integrity commitment process and explores solutions to improve ownership, expectations, and transparency.

To start with answering the question we will review the list of issues we are facing:

• Ambiguity in Ownership: Who oversees the process end-to-end? Who is in charge of delivering?  Clear roles are often missing.
• Unrealistic Expectations: Aligning client demands with organizational capacity is a constant struggle.
• Duplication of Efforts: Managing overlapping content in tools like Jira creates inefficiencies.
• Trade-offs: New commitments often disrupt pre-existing roadmaps, requiring tough prioritization decisions.
• Transparency for both stakeholders and leadership – we want all stakeholders to be exposed to our commitments, their delivery status.

Ownership

Ownership is broken down to 2

Commitment request raised

Commitment request logged in

How a commitment request is being raised by pre sales

 

To solve the problem we need to clearly understand what happens now, and what is causing it.
The sales process and customer life cycle are the cause of customer raising requests, and customer facing teams turning them into commitments.

In the pre sales process there are technical gaps discovered in 1 of 2 ways.

1. Reviewing the client workflow and identifying the gaps
2. reviewing RFP prospects features requirements

The technical engineer review the gaps and decides :

1. Must have gaps
2. Should have gaps
3. Nice to have gaps

According to this breakdown he would try to affect the product plans and add commitments.

How a commitment request is being raised by CS

 

The 2nd type of stakeholders are CS teams, who face gaps in several scenarios

1. Client onboarding – he has missing functionalities that prevents him from onboarding
2. Client renewals – the client is using the renewal to request specific features that he finds beneficial
3. Client cross sell -as part of a cross sell to an existing client, the customer acts as a new prospect for the new feature, and has gaps

Now that we have understood how clients raise their requests, we can move on to the next phase – how to improve this process.

We want both people raising the request, and both people taking the request to be more accountable for this.

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