How to Easily Track Commitments by Your Team
Whether you're leading or working on a digital transformation initiative, your success depends on work getting done by others. Tracking these commitments is critical, but it doesn't need to be complex.
For starters, why are we tracking commitments?
Initiative and organizational success depends on delivering stakeholder value on time
People often juggle competing priorities and might be overcommitted
Most organizations need (and don't have) a structured accountability system
As for how to track commitments, all you need is this simple syntax:
Person to action thing by date @waiting
Not only is this simple, it has worked well for over a decade.
Let's break down each required part:
Person is the name of one person accountable for the work, not a team or group
Action is a verb of they'll do it
Thing is what deliverable or outcome to expect
Optionally, include these:
Date by when completion is expected; if they won't commit, propose a date when you'll follow up
@waiting could also be the hashtag form (#waiting) to easily filter or find these commitments
Here are a few examples:
Alice to review comparative analysis on demographics data enrichment vendors @waiting
Beto to schedule three hour-long meetings with stakeholders from marketing, sales, and operations by Wednesday EOD @waiting
Casey to build revised prospect quoting flow for team to review by January 17 @waiting
The @ or # versions of the word "waiting" will make it a label or tag in most task management apps, allowing you to easily filter views.
Even if you're just tracking these via email or in a doc, searching for that prefixed word gets you to the right place quickly.
Note that if this looks familiar, I touched on how to track action items as part of writing better meeting notes. The same format works well as you delegate things via email, chat, etc.
TLDR: Use this simple, time-tested, and easy to adopt syntax: person to action thing by date @waiting.
