You're facing stakeholder pushback on design changes. How do you navigate their expectations effectively?

Connect with Stakeholder and talk to them about the change, why change is important and how it will affect the project success. Then listen to the stakeholder point of view and discuss on the points which concerns the stakeholder and list out the issues (cost, motivational issues, resource constraints, etc.), analyze and work with stakeholder to resolve and remove the blockers, get the agreement on the design changes to work on - WIN-WIN situation.

In one of Aerodynamic project, Project had a constrain on cost and time to manufacture the scaled module which was required for aero test, after brainstorming with the team we decided to use the strategy which was used to build the full scale model, where the inside structure was reusable and only the affected parts (Aesthetic parts) has to be replaced which was accepted by Project requirements and got all the stakeholders agreement. This strategy was well presented & implemented in 1st project, received good report and was eventually executed in multiple projects. Great success!

Identifying and involving ALLstake holders is a must before getting deep into a design process. The process then throws up the key stake holders and they are the ones who need to be fully involved. When you consistently involve them at every stage it is unlikely that there will be any pushback and hence almost sure that the design will go through

In any of the projects Stakeholders involvement is very much important. Capture all the basic information like what is the issue, which area, what is the effect of the issue, statistic, etc. Based on the information identify the stakeholders and present the information to stakeholders and get their views, define the problem using brainstorming tool, then work on possible solutions. When we involve stakeholders at the initial stage we can get Stakeholder buy-in.

In multiple scenarios, we would face hard discussions between cross functional teams to get agreement to achieve the objectives. It is better to list down the blockers from respective teams and negotiate with stakeholders to trade-off to achieve the intended objective with all stakeholders agreement. It may be proposing alternative options on time, cost, scope or quality (at the least). Taking experts advice.

In one of accessories design & development project, there were some components for which the mounting was using tape, based on the SOW supplier proposed their regular tape which were fulfilling the technical requirements, but the durability was not effective. After discussion with multiple distributors and supplier, the data was presented to stakeholders with Pros & Cons which includes performance, cost, design of tape application. Chose the tape, highlighted the benefits of products which fulfills the brand loyalty status of the company.