Every project manager has, at some low moment, had the thought: this would all run beautifully if it weren't for the people. Budget, timeline, scope - those are tractable. It's the humans that make it hard.
Which is unhelpful, because the humans are the project. So the real question is how you get stakeholders genuinely aligned, particularly in a large organisation where they're scattered across departments with different incentives and different definitions of success.
Who you're actually dealing with
Stakeholders come in more varieties than people expect. The internal project team. Decision-makers from across departments who weren't in the kick-off. Senior people in the organisation that commissioned the work. The board, who may well hold the purse strings without ever attending a meeting. And then external parties - suppliers, partners, and the end users themselves, who have the largest stake and usually the smallest voice.
Each of them is in this for a different reason. Each has a different outcome they need. And each of them, quite sincerely, believes their objective is the one that matters most.
The job is to be the middleperson
The project manager's role here is to be the person who holds the whole picture - who knows what has to be true for this to be called a success, and who has that written down somewhere everybody can see it.
That means eliciting and documenting requirements, functional and otherwise, from a diverse and frequently contradictory group. And it means making sure the objectives and KPIs are shared, not just agreed - so that everyone understands why the project exists and what their part in it is.
Sounds administrative. It's actually the whole game.
The sequence that works
Define the goal first, at a high level. Before anyone argues about what to build, agree what the project is for - and derive it from the organisation's actual business goals, not from the wish list. At this stage you deliberately don't care how each part contributes. You're setting the scene.
Then do a proper stakeholder analysis. Who genuinely makes the decisions - one person, or a board vote? Who is influential without being a decision-maker (this is the one people miss, and it derails more projects than any other)? And who controls the budget, and which department is actually bearing the cost?
Skipping this step is one of the more reliable ways to lose three months. You discover the real decision-maker in week fourteen, and everything agreed before that has to be relitigated.
Then map the journeys and processes. Not just the customer's - the internal ones too. How does marketing, who admin the website, actually interact with IT, who own the infrastructure? Where's the overlap, and who currently smooths it over by hand? Map each stakeholder group's process, then look at how the picture fits together. You'll usually find the friction lives in the gaps between them, not inside any one of them.
You discover the real decision-maker in week fourteen. Everything agreed before that now has to be relitigated. This is what skipping stakeholder analysis costs.
The uncomfortable truth about alignment
Here's where I'd push back on the conventional wisdom. "Alignment" is often used to mean "everyone is happy", and that's not achievable. On any project of consequence, somebody's priority will lose. Pretending otherwise doesn't produce alignment - it produces a silence that breaks at the worst possible moment, usually in a steering meeting, usually about something that was decided in month two.
Real alignment means everyone knows what was decided, why, and what it cost them. That's a different and much more durable thing than everyone agreeing. It also requires someone to be willing to say the trade-off out loud, which is the part most project managers are least keen on.
The question
If you asked each of your key stakeholders, separately, what this project needs to achieve - how many different answers would you get? And has anyone actually asked?
That exercise takes an afternoon and routinely changes the shape of a programme.
If you'd like a hand with it, book a short discovery call with the team at Distinction. No pitch, just a practical conversation about what's really being agreed.
