How do you handle conflicting or changing stakeholder expectations?

In my experience measuring importance can be hard. In some organisations it can vary from mid level stakeholders who have and use mob power to destabalise projects to people with senior roles but no followers. In other organisation there are stakeholders who are great contributors or leaders. In either context the first step is to identify the Senior Responsible Officer (SRO) for the project as they act as a effective guide to the prioiritisation.

I approach conflicting or changing stakeholder expectations by first actively listening to understand the root causes of discrepancies. Through open communication and empathy, I strive to find common ground and foster consensus among stakeholders. Utilizing techniques such as stakeholder analysis, I prioritize and align expectations with project objectives and constraints. Additionally, I advocate for transparent communication channels to keep stakeholders informed of changes and their potential impacts. By proactively managing expectations and facilitating collaborative problem-solving, I aim to mitigate conflicts and ensure alignment throughout the project lifecycle.

In my experience you need to ensure that you have a tiered approach to dealing with stakeholders similar to field sports where you have a marker for each player. Each category of stakeholder should have an equivalent on the delivery team that they can partner with. The culture and style of the organisation and the individual stakeholders need to be taken into consideration as some individual work better in 1 to 1 engagements. This consideration needs to be extended to group meetings to ensure that each individual is facilitated to contribute. This is best facilitated by asking inclusive questions like "John in our meeting on Monday you mentioned _X_ would you like to come in on this point.

In my experience change management is complex in both Agile and Waterfall deliveries. You need to ensure that you have good governance which ever methodology you adopt. You need to ensure that your governance empowers teams and individuals to make decisions rapidly while keeping stakeholders informed. Change requests should rarely be escalated to programme boards except in complex financial and programme/portfolio conflict situations.

In the context of delivering value, if an organisation is mature in terms of benefits realisation, it is a good idea to align with their methodology or practice. This is especially true in organisations that have adopted Lean practice as benefits are likely to be "SMART" by nature. In organisations where benefits management is immature or there is a lack of ownership around long term benefits measurement, it is a good idea to make use of technologies that monitor usage of delivered features. These metrics will consistantly report on feature useage and adoption and support the continuous improvement cycle for product development.