E · Collaboration, communication, and influence
Stakeholder influence
Moving cross-team outcomes without direct authority.
Classification boundary
Include: Include building alignment, support, and decision influence without direct authority.
Choose a neighboring leaf when: Use negotiation for explicit exchanges and commitments, and communication for clarity of expression.
This capability may appear in standards across different stages. Explore stage expectations
33 questions
Choose a group based on the evidence you need. Groups follow existing question formats, not difficulty or mandatory prerequisites. Each batch has up to eight questions.
Judgment and options24
Compare goals, constraints, options, and trade-offs.
Questions 1–8
- A project sponsor changes success from launch, to adoption, to cost reduction, affecting different teams each time. How would you make changes explicit and protect teams from repeated rework?
- Several teams use a metric with the same name to make opposing decisions, but you cannot mandate a definition. How would you build an influence path?
- The vendor contract promises average availability, while the business cares about data recovery and incident notification. How would you align internal stakeholders to drive change?
- Product promises features, engineering promises dates, and operations promises ticket handling, but nobody owns whether customers complete the key task. How would you reset goals with these leads?
- A cross-functional review is shortened to ten minutes, and decision-makers only want to know whether launch can stay on schedule. Your evidence shows two risks with different impact scopes. How would you organize the information so they can make an informed choice quickly?
- You want to push something valuable to the team in the long run that nobody is asking for now. Why do it, how do you persuade others, do you push top-down or bottom-up, and how do you show its value?
- Your project depends on another team fixing a data defect. They have higher-priority work and no reporting relationship with you, but customers cannot reconcile accounts. How would you make the case and offer decision evidence?
- When you give an overall report upward, how do you present it and win more resources for the team? When different organizations have different goals, how do you connect your team's goals to theirs?
No questions in this section match your target. ·
Questions 9–16
- You want another team to change an interface, but you have no authority over them. What do you do?
- A cross-department meeting records a decision, but an affected team says it cannot deliver on time. How would you confirm who accepted the decision, which objections remain, and who owns the next step?
- The release owner decides to ship on schedule. The security team says residual risk exceeds its acceptance range, but leadership chooses to continue. How would you record dissent, responsibility, and review conditions and clarify executable scope and escalation boundaries?
- Several teams maintain similar interfaces with inconsistent cost and user experience. You must promote a shared approach without management authority. How would you build adoption?
- Leaders have approved a new review process, but frontline staff report more waiting and workarounds. You do not own the final decision. How would you prompt reassessment?
- Near launch, a security review finds design issues and the business says requirements arrived too late. How would you improve involvement in future projects?
- A key department will not commit capacity because most benefits accrue to other teams. How would you understand concerns and build support?
- A business owner distrusts a new dashboard because it conflicts with existing reports. You must encourage use without mandate. What would you do?
No questions in this section match your target. ·
Questions 17–24
- A project spans sales, product, engineering, and support, each with different goals and cadences and accountability only for local output. How would you create joint progress?
- A team rejects a new way of working because it may add coordination cost. You believe it could address repeated delays but lack local evidence. How would you proceed?
- An infrastructure change would reduce maintenance risk across teams, but no business department wants to fund it. How would you build support?
- Expert analysis does not support an intuitive business proposal, yet the owner wants to proceed. How would you help both sides make an evidence-based decision?
- Departments use different customer identity rules, causing duplicate service and compliance risk. You must promote consistency across local workflows. How would you proceed?
- A project needs a business owner to confirm rules, but they have missed reviews for weeks. How would you keep work moving without making unauthorized decisions?
- Research finds users struggle at a critical step, but engineering and operations see change as too costly. How would you get the evidence discussed and turn it into action?
- A stakeholder repeatedly requests color and layout changes without user evidence, and the changes may weaken hierarchy. How would you respond and define a testable option?
No questions in this section match your target. ·
Experience and reflection9
Use past facts to examine contribution, results, and learning.
Questions 1–8
- Several teams agree in a review to improve data quality, but two weeks later no one has taken the implementation work; each lead believes agreement itself completed the collaboration. How would you turn consensus into ownership and checkpoints?
- Did you ever try to break out of your resource or collaboration limits, such as bringing other teams in or asking upward for larger resources? How did you make the case, and what happened?
- When would you escalate a cross-team problem to a higher level, and how would you describe it?
- Has this solution had any influence outside your organization, such as being adopted by other companies or communities, shared publicly, open sourced, or written up? What is the evidence?
- A project improves short-term metrics but increases maintenance burden and complaints; executive reporting shows only growth. How would you broaden the assessment?
- You find that an executive-backed plan may miss its goal and have no immediate alternative. You need to report the risk while keeping teams moving. How would you act?
- The team promised a feature externally, but new user evidence suggests the core problem may not exist. Without final authority, how would you reopen the decision without triggering personal defensiveness?
- A dependency team asks you to decide every trade-off, interrupting your work and preventing its own judgment from developing. How would you change the collaboration?
No questions in this section match your target. ·
Questions 9–9
No questions in this section match your target. ·
No questions in this capability match your target. ·