Questions to Ask

Trigger Questions to Surface Context

These are general-purpose questions to use with strategic customers and stakeholders to understand their priorities, success criteria, and adoption landscape.

• What are your most important priorities?
  • What most enables or holds you back from achieving these priorities?
• What does success for you look like in 3-months, 6-months or a year?
  • How can that success best be empowered through use of the platform?
  • What key dependencies does that create? How can they best be addressed?
  • What markers of success might we identify?
  • How can we best monitor them and adapt as we learn?
  • What better outcomes do you hope to achieve through a more effective digital platform for collaboration?
• What are the most important actions and ways of working that might be necessary to support this?
  • How could we get these off to a good start?
  • What bespoke support might be most helpful in achieving that?
• Who among your stakeholders is most influential?
  • What do they most care about?
  • How can we work with them to mobilise broader participation through their influence?
• Who among your stakeholders might have most resistance to adoption?
  • How might this be overcome?

Partly about developing further the shared understanding, partly about surfacing up the change management landscape.

Preparation Approach

The best prep may come from seeking to understand the stakeholder’s goals in their own terms, reflecting on what would most help them achieve those goals, and then identifying the right role(s) for Alkemio to play in supporting them.

On the day, ideally start with open questions and move to more leading questions as the right opportunities come into focus.

Open Questions

Designed to understand the stakeholder’s landscape, priorities, and trajectory before proposing solutions.

• What is your latest understanding of recent changes in your landscape? What might this imply for progress in the coming months?
• How can we be most helpful in supporting your efforts?
• What is the most likely trajectory of your GovTech transition?
• What are likely to be the most important deciding factors driving the level of success that can be achieved?
• Who are your most important interlocutors across government and the public sector? What are their key priorities?
• And what are your most important next steps?

Leading Questions

Designed to move towards concrete actions and partnership opportunities once the landscape is understood.

• Could resource from us be helpful in supporting a mapping of the potential needs for a platform to act as the nervous system for the GovTech transformation? And of the initiatives you are seeking to support through the transformation?
• How might insights from that process be useful to you in their own right and also best shape Alkemio’s development pathway as we seek to become an ever more useful partner?
• Is there any imaginative/innovation or prototyping capability for presentational or engagement purposes that might support the GovTech initiative as it unfolds and that we may be able to support you with?
• How might we best adapt our ongoing work together over time?
• The questions from the second draft of your own GovTech paper are also highly relevant as are the questions raised by Jeroen in the graphics you mentioned.

Notes

The level of near-term success may be dependent on exactly the kind of political will that drives progress in the GovTech transition. The direction is set but could move quickly with the right leadership-level support in government, through the new Secretary of State and beyond.