Last time I wrote about managing the project and the team during the end of year countdown and the holiday period – today I’m thinking about managing stakeholder expectations.
Let’s face it, our stakeholders are also distracted by holidays, year-end processes, and vacations, and we still need to keep them engaged and informed about project work. Here are four practical strategies to keep everything on track at this time of year.
- Understand their availability
Are they taking time off? You can ask – even senior leaders are likely to be scheduling a break! Their availability (or lack of it) might mean rescheduling project board or steering group meetings, and it’s better to know about that early.
Discuss realistic expectations for responses and turnaround times during December – if you’ve got key members of the project team out of the office, you might need a little longer to get back to them, or they might need to deal with someone else on the team. Pass along any contact details or make introductions beforehand so they know who to talk to – and so that person is aware that senior leaders may be reaching out while they are covering for a colleague.
- Prioritise critical deliverables
Make sure you and your stakeholders have a shared view of what deliverables are critical for this period. Define what must be completed before year-end and what can wait. That might already be clear from your project plan, but if you are working in an agile way or in an environment of high uncertainty, it would be worth reiterating what is possible before the end of December.
If you can, think about how you can build flexibility into timelines and make those suggestions. The stakeholders might not understand what goes into completing a task, so they might see something as do-able when in fact it is not. If your office has a mandatory closure or an IT change freeze, that might also eat into the time available to complete work.
A clear list of urgent deliverables and non-urgent tasks can help everyone prioritise, and it’s likely to look different from the last time you created one, because that’s life!
- Communicate early and often
This is not going to come as a surprise, as communicating early and often is something you’ll be doing all year round. However, at this time of year, there can be a lot of communications, a lot of deadlines and messages can get lost.
Check in to see how they would like to be updated and if that is different from the rest of the year, update your comms plan so you don’t have to ask again next year.
- Think about stakeholder fatigue
We all need a break, right? Stakeholders are no different. If you’ve been powering on waiting for the holidays, so have they. Think about how you can keep stakeholders engaged during a busy time, maybe cutting the length of meetings, sharing papers earlier so they can read them before a meeting or sending out weekly email updates instead of having status update calls.
Don’t forget to say thank you! We tend to schedule time with the team to celebrate achievements, but our senior leaders were also part of that, so recognise their contribution too. You might be the only one who does…
Good planning and communication can help manage stakeholder expectations even when times are busy – and the run up to year end is definitely busy!
Community Champion
