How can you ensure stakeholders are aligned with strategic goals when managing multiple projects?

Ensuring stakeholder alignment with strategic goals across multiple projects necessitates clear communication of overarching objectives, consistent stakeholder engagement, alignment of project goals with the broader strategy, and change management, fostering cross-project collaboration, periodic alignment reviews, and strong executive support. By intertwining each project's objectives with the organization's strategic vision, actively involving stakeholders in discussions, and making adjustments as needed to maintain alignment, project managers can foster a cohesive approach, ensuring that every project contributes effectively to the overarching strategic goals of the organization.

Build a stakeholder matrix speak to your stakeholders and capture their appetite for the project. Different types of stakeholders may need a different communication approach. Team manager may want weekly updates but CRB will want monthly. This can all be capture in your matrix. Which can then feed in to your plans.

Remember that all stakeholders are important, but not all are equally important... Use RACI to map out your stakeholders: Responsible - who is doing the work Accountable - who has authority to approve Consulted - who needs to input Informed - who just needs to be updated Note that certain stakeholders may need a different RACI category for different activities or deliverables of the project.

When managing multiple projects, communication to your key stakeholders is extremely important. If you keep your stakeholders informed and updated at all stages, you not only win their confidence in the project but also build the trust factor. This helps you get the required support when needed and addresses the challenges as they come along during the project lifecycle.

Do SMART goals work? Yes! Does it take time to define real SMART goals? Absolutely yes! But it is time well spent. Without the guiding boundary of any of the 5 elements of SMART, the goal can drift. Look at each SMART goal and ask, "how does this help us achieve our mission?" - if you are struggling to answer that question, then the goal is wrong.

I find it helpful to think of the strategic goal as the end result - the ball in the back of the net! To get there, you need shorter term tactics and targets, you need to overcome challenges and you will probably get back up off the floor a couple of times. And just like in sport, you can use data and metrics to analyse whether your tactics are working.

I find it immensely helpful to group project tasks into "buckets". Then label these buckets as project workstreams. Afterwards, instead of a jumbled list of say 100 tasks, you will have 5 workstreams of 20 closely related tasks. This makes identifying dependencies within workstreams easier. It also allows critical path analysis between workstreams. Reporting at a summary level is also more straight forward to prepare, present and understand - it becomes quickly apparent when one workstream is falling behind.

Projects should be mapped to the organization’s strategic objectives - this can be achieved by implementing balanced scorecard. When you identify the projects that will serve these objectives, you can map each project to primary and secondary objectives. Each project should be assigned an owner (accountable stakeholder) - who should always look at the big picture and align his/her project(s) to the organization’s overall strategic objectives.