Stakeholder Management: Getting alignment [As a PM]

As Dan points out below, stakeholder management is the practice of alleged vampires (PMs) negotiating with mobs (everyone else in the business + customers) calling for blood (an increase in X KPI). Right, onto something more serious …

As a PM, a large part of your job is to get alignment on big decisions from various teams.

But how you can effectively manage this process? What approach should you take? Do I hold a meeting or how does it work? Let's explore how we might approach it.

The Stakeholder Map

When starting a new role or a new project, the best place to start would be to understand who your stakeholders are and what are their roles. Maybe set up a quick intro or go for a coffee and you then start to understand more about their role and responsibilities.

This way you can start to develop your stakeholder map, understand the intricacies of the business and avoid any misalignment in the near future.

The Goals

Naturally, the next step would be to understand the goals of your stakeholders. This is especially true when building or developing your product roadmap. In the past, there have been times when stakeholders pushed for projects/features I didn't think would be of great importance.

It might even be better to understand each of your stakeholder's goals before a key decision or roadmap discussion meeting. This way you can lay out everybody's goals and align on the most important priorities.

The Decision Maker

I know what your thinking, it would be quite strange or intimating to ask “Whos the decision maker ?” or “Who makes the decisions in your team?” as multiple people may think it's them.

But in reality, it's very important. Once you know the answer to this question, you can then discuss with this group how they’re going to make their decisions.

The Facilitator

A great way to speak to stakeholders individually is to be empathetic, really listen and be genuinely interested in what they have to say. This way they are more likely to be more open and be on your side in times of need.

A great way to do this in a meeting is to use confluence meeting notes and project them while you note them down. This makes sure that they can see their points are collected accurately.

The Alignment

So now that you have successfully understood who the key stakeholders are and what their goals are, you need to align on the top priorities.

The best way to do this would be to agree on a framework on how we want to prioritise. An absolute classic job for a PM, but we love it secretly. For simplicity let's just choose two variables: value + cost (low, medium or high).

Once chosen, you can then evaluate, agree on the top priorities and then inform the wider team.

The Escalation

But the alignment stage doesn't always go to plan, and there are stakeholders who are adamant that their priorities are more important than others. This may be that they don't have a full 360 view of the business and therefore are blinded.

If this is the case, I guess the first step would be to understand the other's point of view and whether their concerns outweigh the mine or the rest of the key stakeholders. If unsure, then it should be escalated to leadership.

This is not a negative and should not be treated as one. It's most definitely out of respect more than anything and your asking leadership to make a decision based on a larger context.

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