Tips for Successful Stakeholder Engagement

[vagrawal]

There are several factors that may impact your project success. One of the important factors is stakeholder engagement. It is often seen that project failed to produce its intended value due to lack of engagement from right stakeholders. In today's agile world, it is essential for scrum master to engage stakeholders at the right time at the right level. This helps to manage risks and issues proactively and build strong partnership.

For effective project execution, you may consider following.

Identify the right stakeholders: It is important before kicking off a project, you should identify the all the stakeholders who can influence the project decisions. This is not restricted to immediate development team but should also include folks from business and operations. It is good time to know your stakeholder and start building relationship. This will be helpful to understand project requirement and to make necessary decisions to move things forward. You should have stakeholder map documented and available for team to review. This should be live document and should be updated on regular basis to keep it accurate.

Get them involved: It is essential for stakeholder to stay engaged throughout the project. Look for early signals of stakeholder disengagement and address the issue right then. Use weekly status reports, regular checkpoint and sprint retrospective meetings, as a means to ensure stakeholder involvement is visible and monitored on the project. You can look for opportunity to reward and recognize stakeholder involvement, such as celebration for completing first sprint.

Manage their expectation: Not managing stakeholder expectation adequately may take project on wrong path and results into failure. Meet with project sponsor and key stakeholders prior to kick-off. Listen to their feedback and concern. Understand set/reset their expectations; understand what success looks like to them. Follow three easy steps to manage their expectation.

1.Tell them what are you going to do

2.Do it

3.Then, tell them what you did.

Agreement on definition of "done": It is crucial to create a shared definition of “done” for effectively managing stakeholder's expectation. Each stakeholder based on their area of work has certain criteria for done. It is important to align these definition and making sure stakeholders understand it. You can’t manage their expectation if you do not know what “done” like to them.

Informed them about project progress: It is important for your stakeholder to know how they will be informed about project progress and communicate with project team, to ensure everyone is on same page and kept up to date.There are several ways to keep project team informed. Leverage face-to-face discussion as often as you can, it is one of the most effective ways of communication. For remote teams, consider leveraging videoconference, voice chat etc. for effective communication. Consider scrum recommended meetings such as sprint planning, daily scrums, sprint review and sprint retrospectives. You may use additional meetings as you see the need. 1:1 meetings, project checkpoint and steering committee meetings are quite beneficial to establish trust and keep large team informed about project. Sprint Board and Burn Down charts are two powerful tools to catch stakeholder attention quickly without much explanation.

Show them as you actually build pieces: Sprint demo is powerful way to get stakeholder feedback on the functionalities getting development. This makes the project progress highly visible and help to keep stakeholder involved as different pieces are built. This help to gain stakeholder confidence with the project team and keep them involved. If customer/sponsor does not like any feature, you can get that feedback as it is getting build and have opportunity to react and do any course correction if needed.

These are just few tips and not a complete list. Each project is unique and stakeholder engagement should be carefully crafted to address stakeholder’s need. In summary, stakeholder engagement is key for project success, always identify key stakeholders as early as possible. Ask for and understand their expectation and review expectation on regular basis. Shift in business priorities may change their expectation. Plan ahead and communicate proactively to keep everyone up to date. The more your stakeholders are engaged the better the chances of project success.