How can you use Agile methodologies to manage stakeholder engagement in a project with limited resources?

"Customer Collaboration over Contract Negotiation" itself is one of the Agile manifestos, which depicts how customer involvement is crucial for the product success. Agile suggests frameworks which focus on iterative delivery where key parameters are "inspection" & "adaptation".Involving stakeholders in the right events, like the planning, backlog grooming, reviews, is one way of stakeholder involvement, which might not be enough as we can see how fast the market is changing. So twist & twig of the product roadmap to align with the product vision is a must. Having quarterly workshops with stakeholders to get realigned with the product vision & adapting required changes will definitely bring out product value which leads to product success.

The main purpose to apply Agile is to satisfy the stakeholders as previously they were doing the same by creating the vision, goal, scope, etc... The main problem was that they are wait until late stages to evaluate the output or the outcome to late when they already consumed all the project or product resources then they realized to late that nothing has successfully achieved Defining Vision and goals in Agile is not a fixed process as we move forward and learn more about the Stakeholders need and evaluating the outcomes we have at each stage We have a chance to successfully achieve an incremental Value to successfully achieve our main goals in sequence and incrementally achieve and realize the benefits and vision we were targeting to.

The most agile value I have found helpful is "Responding to change over following a plan". "Responding" here is not restricted to any particular individual or party; it encompasses every project member. In my view, this approach transforms each team member into a valuable contributor and broadens the engagement between the project stakeholders.

Everyone should share in the vision, and that means everyone. A fundamental component of agile teams is that fast but thoughtful decision-making happens almost autonomously precisely because everyone is so invested in the overall vision that it just flows. This then transforms into extreme ownership, which is what I strive to have in every team that aspires to be agile. The neat part about this is that you don't know the exact moment when your team really understands the vision, but when it happens everyone feels a "click". Furthermore, understanding the vision is not a one-time endeavor, it does not happen at the beginning of the project, it is continuous. Aspire to get that "click"

I believe that to navigate a project with limited resources, we need to think and act more like Product Managers and aim to strike the perfect balance between the technical possibilities, user needs, and business objectives. Agile methodologies offer a solid framework for development and adaptability, but stakeholder engagement needs more. By merging Product Management with Agile, we can: Prioritize Stakeholder Needs: Focus on high-impact features for optimal resource use. Continuous Feedback Loop: Regularly align projects with business and user needs through stakeholder reviews. Collaborative Decision-Making: Foster transparency, making stakeholders active decision partners. Optimize Resources: Direct resources where they matter most.

Tailor involvement to interest and project needs based on Agile prioritization: 1) Key Stakeholders - High interest, high influence. Engage frequently for input and approval. 2) Primary Stakeholders - Medium interest and influence. Keep informed and gather periodic feedback. 3) Secondary Stakeholders - Low interest and influence. Monitor with low touchpoints. Prioritize stakeholder groups based on importance of their needs and project impact. Key stakeholders get top priority.

As the project progresses, it is essential to continuously assess and reassess the stakeholders involved, taking into account their level of influence. This will not only help determine the appropriate communication channels needed to keep everyone informed and engaged, but also ensure that their input is taken into consideration throughout the development process. As such, it is important for the Scrum Master or Product Owner to facilitate and encourage stakeholder participation, particularly during sprint reviews, to gather their valuable feedback and potentially add new stories to the backlog.

identifying stakeholders with their interests and capabilities to easily know who will do what. RACI Matrix define responsibilities of stakeholders on areas so this will be a reference to know who will important on each area we have which on term provide us priorities for each area

Agile projects are having undercurrent of uncertainty, continuously evolving backlog and based on the nature of project the agile approaches and the way to manage stakeholders also change. Like, Scrum team has PO, SM & Devs who are closely collaborating with personas, VOCs and other mediums to understand the effectivity and efficiency of their outcome. In Kanban, there is a continuous flow of ticket. The emphasis is more on collaborating with stakeholders in your upstream and downstream. In XP, the emphasis is much on faster delivery that the customer is expected to sit with the team at the same place. So, I'll conclude by saying that identifying and prioritising stakeholders is not a one-off activity but the key is do it continuously.

If you need a RACI chart, your initiatives are too big and complex. Large projects fail because they take longer. While it is taking longer, more things are added. When more things are added, the initiative becomes unwieldy. Build in sustainable ways. Establish a vision. Prioritize the strategic initiatives *after understanding capacity. Ask the ones closest to the work to assess and gauge confidence. Build end-to-end in vertical slices of work so that value can be delivered incrementally and iteratively. Get feedback early and often to inform direction. Stop when the customer is satisfied and move to something else of greater value. (Delivering "scope" usually robs you of the chance to end an effort early and save costs/efforts.)

1. Define Objectives and Strategies: Define the purpose of engaging the stakeholders and the steps. 2. Identify Communication Channels and Methods: Find out how best you can interact with your stakeholders. These can be through meetings, emails, reports, and approaches. 3. Determine Information Needs: Identify the information that the stakeholders demand, the time frame in which the information is necessary and the specific method of communication. 4. Define Roles and Responsibilities: Be clear on the roles and responsibilities of the stakeholders during the stakeholder engagement process. 5. Identify Risks and Issues: Highlight possible pitfalls in stakeholder engagement and outline how to overcome them.

Staying focused, structured, consistent, and transparent in stakeholder communications is key. Limiting interactions doesn't mean cutting stakeholders out - it means optimizing how and when you connect. With some creativity and discipline, you can maintain excellent stakeholder experiences even with finite resources. Leverage asynchronous communications like emails, online dashboards, and instant messaging when possible, rather than always defaulting to meetings. Use meetings for critical conversations and decisions. Get creative with modes of communication - chat groups, virtual coffee breaks, and informal video calls can gather input without assembling everyone in one place.

Continuous Communication: Maintain open and continuous communication channels with stakeholders. Agile practices like daily stand-ups provide opportunities for stakeholders to stay updated on progress and raise concerns early.

In the journey of stakeholder engagement, a plan should be a guiding star, not an inflexible map. A good plan incorporates continuous improvement, regular questioning, and the flexibility to update strategies based on evolving insights. Imagine a scenario where a project plan becomes the holy bible and it doesn't account for shifting priorities or unforeseen challenges. In such cases, it is better to err on the side of more communication and collaboration than to rigidly follow a plan. Keep a core element constant, such as time, while allowing other aspects to adapt. This approach mitigates the risk of succumbing to the sunk-cost fallacy. Above all, it's essential to embody the core philosophy of agility: adaptability

Stakeholder engagement is key and Agile "tools" can help but some of these Agile tools are not designed to promote stakeholder engagement. For example in Scrum the Daily Scrum (daily stand-up) is for the Developers and the Retrospective is for the team. Including stakeholders in these events would be an anti-pattern and would undermine the effectiveness of the event.

Here are some tips for delivering value iteratively and incrementally to manage stakeholders with limited resources: 1) Break the project into small, manageable increments or sprints (e.g. 1-2 weeks) 2) Prioritize features and functions that deliver the highest value to stakeholders early 3) At the end of each sprint, deliver a usable product increment that stakeholders can evaluate 4) Gather regular feedback from stakeholders on each increment to guide future development 5) Adjust scope or timelines based on feedback to maximize value within resource constraints 6) Use burn down charts or cumulative flow diagrams to visually show progress to stakeholders

Focus on delivering a Minimum Viable Product that meets the essential needs of stakeholders. This ensures you're not spreading resources too thin and still providing value.

Rather than deliver an MVP (which can often be more “minimal” than “viable”) try building a Minimum Loveable Product instead. Spending a little effort to delight users (or to fix a few breaking changes) can give your MVP release a longer shelf life and keep users engaged with your product - and you’ll be maximising the value in your release

Delivering value iteratively and incrementally is the essence of agility. Having a definition of ready and ensuring that only the ready items make it to the sprint backlog ensures that no time will be wasted during development due to blockers. Backlog grooming sessions help to constantly prioritise items based on any new information from the market ensuring that your backlog stays up to date. The sprint time boxes ensure that you can release value with short time spans for example you can decide to have a shippable increment every two weeks. A sprint time box can not be less than 1 week and not more than 4 weeks.

Agility is a business concern—not a software development one. Before adopting Agile frameworks, give the stakeholders a chance to opt out. Use this as a strong signal for trust and collaboration. Rather than following these frameworks by the book—talk to your vertical. What is the biggest problem holding you back? Is it lack of Scrum or XP? Express it with values and processes that your customers and stakeholders care about. They certainly don't care about Scrum or Kanban.

The key is open communication, setting clear expectations, validating interpretations, and focusing stakeholder input on priority areas to provide valuable insights without going over budget. Manage expectations while welcoming feedback. Set clear expectations upfront about the project scope, timeline, budget, and delivery commitments. Be realistic about what can be achieved. Focus stakeholder feedback requests on the most important decisions and priority areas. Avoid asking for feedback on everything. Solicit feedback asynchronously via surveys, polls, and online comment forms rather than live sessions. This scales better with limited time/budget.

Agile promotes regular communication. Maintain an open and transparent line of communication with stakeholders. Ensure that they are aware of project progress, challenges, and successes. This helps in managing expectations.

Clear communication and managing stakeholder expectations and feedback align with Agile principles of flexibility and collaboration. Agile practices like user feedback sessions, acceptance testing, prototyping, and usability testing to actively gather and integrate stakeholder input into product development and enhancement. Additionally, utilize Agile skills such as active listening, empathy, negotiation, and conflict resolution to address any emerging concerns or conflicts. Effective expectation management can be achieved by setting practical goals, judiciously handling scope changes, and consistently delivering value regularly.

Identify Stakeholders: Begin by stating all people that are impacted, involved with, and have influence over this project. Such can be team members, customers, suppliers, regulatory authorities and external partners. Prioritize Stakeholders: Based on this analysis, create a prioritization framework for stakeholders, consisting of 4 groups – Stakeholder identification and prioritization exercise is never done once. This is a continuous and dynamic process, which must be checked periodically along the way.

There is tons of material available on internet to see what someone else has done to manage stakeholder expectations and feedback. But every situation is different, every stakeholder is different and vision and objectives are most certainly different. Agile allows your to chose your own ways to deliver the objectives. Be creative. Do a stakeholder analysis and mapping and find out what would keep your stakeholder best engaged and an engaged stakeholder is your best partner as then you don’t have to run after them for feedback. They will chase you (in a good way ??) to offer feedback and help.

Here are some tips for evaluating and improving stakeholder engagement with limited project resources: 1) Conduct regular pulse checks with stakeholders to assess satisfaction 2) Send stakeholder surveys at key milestones to quantify engagement 3) Hold retrospective meetings to review what worked well and where to improve 4) Track engagement metrics like stakeholder communication frequency/quality 5) Analyze feedback on delivered increments to guide engagement focus 6) Identify stakeholder segments that need more tailored engagement 7) Assign stakeholder liaisons to gather constant informal feedback 8) Re-validate stakeholder priorities and ensure alignment 9) Evaluate your communications for clarity, frequency and transparency

Surveys or feedback forms tend to be fairly ineffective means to capture relevant feedback. Most of the time, they give a very skewed perspective, as people tend not to bother with them unless they have a gripe. Internal stakeholders are best actively engaged in Refinement, Co-creation sessions and Reviews. Customers, depending on the product, are generally best engaged by flexible communication channels like Discord, which allow them to voice their thoughts and get your input or recommendations in real time. While this is often a bit more stressful, such a channel offers much richer feedback in a natural way, while simultaneously building communities.

I’d be hesitant to recommend a one size fits all approach here. There is no such thing as a typical stakeholder. Every stakeholder, project, and organisation varies massively. Engagement takes many forms, and the best advice here is to take a tailored user centred design approach.

Trust gets built with predictable delivery. Focus on predictability rather than the quantity. The stakeholder engagement is not a strategy, it's the hard work you need to do !!

Dashboards are incredibly useful for evaluating and improving stakeholder engagement. A dashboard doesn't have to be expensive or complex. It does however require data and the capacity to identify both leading and lagging indicators around the factors you want to measure. How are these leading/lagging indicators linked to KPIs of your team members? It's simple to "connect the dots", but getting clear about "what" you want to measure, "how" you want to measure and "why" you want to measure these key indicators are important for successful ongoing stakeholder engagement.

Early delivery of business value is one of the key differentiators of "Agile Methodologies". From my experience, Agile promotes stakeholder engagement with limited resources by delivering value early and often. This is key. Build it and they will come.

Prioritize stakeholder needs using user stories or backlogs. Identify the minimal viable product that delivers core value. Engage stakeholders early and often for feedback to ensure alignment. Use timeboxed iterations to demonstrate progress and gather feedback frequently. This allows for course correction with minimal waste. Embrace transparency by visibly tracking status, blockers, and risks. This builds trust through openness. Share iteration results to showcase progress. Empower customers to make decisions about priority features. This ensures you build what matters most within constraints. Promote collaboration between business and delivery teams. Jointly plan iterations based on priority and capacity to manage expectations.

The concept of 'agile' is very relevant to stakeholder engagement. You need to iterate, respond to changing information and circumstances. As you progress with your project or work you will 'discover' new stakeholders or new issues that need to be considered. Having an agile mindset and approach will help you stay flexible enough to accommodate those changes and respond accordingly. I'm not sure that you need to implement all the Agile ceremonies to get the benefit of this approach, but some of the broader concepts are certainly very applicable.

Focusing solely on project goals can lead us to lose sight of the broader product vision. It's crucial to align with user needs and market dynamics for long-term value. A tool I recommend is Roman Pichler's Product Vision Board. It offers a holistic view, identifying target users and their needs while also highlighting business objectives. Instead of just completing project tasks, we ensure each sprint aligns with the bigger product narrative. It's a pivot from just projects to lasting products. Give it a try!

Foremost is the identification & prioritization of relevant stakeholders for the concerned goal / vision of the project. Use Agile ceremonies to see their consistent involvement & feedback like product backlog grooming, sprint reviews & demos, retrospectives, lessons learned, and improvements planned. This should be accompanied by Agile metrics like velocity, burn-down & burn-up charts for their review and future roadmap.