How do you balance the need for delivery in a cost conscious, high demand, customer centric world? How do we deal with stakeholders who are demanding more and more? How do you engage stakeholders with new solutions and get them to participate, use and buy-in?
Traditional approaches don’t work, agile is not suited to many projects, time to market is key but organisational approval processes are still slow to respond. There is no best way, there is no one way for a project manager to manage these issues. But there is a way. Don’t engage your millennial stakeholders the same way as the more experienced. If you have a PMO – don’t recruit a Project Executive who shuffles e-paper, employ someone who can create animations, videos, build dynamic tools, who can engage with stakeholders in a creative and modern way.
Mix your agile and waterfall approaches, discard non added value activities, take some calculated risk (I mean not every ‘t’ need to be crossed!). Challenge the approval processes, move to approval in principle, incremental sign-offs, question tolerances and socialise, socialise, socialise. In other words sell the idea first – network talk concepts, create anticipation if not ‘excitement’. And don’t be a push