Everyone agrees on a common goal, is motivated and good at their jobs. Yet somehow, disagreements happen along the way, and the project gets bogged down. PMI’s Pulse of the Profession research found that only about half of all projects succeed globally, and other industry data puts the share running over budget as high as 70%. A common cause is the mistaken thought that a common goal is the same as having true stakeholder alignment.

In the article titled “Why Consensus Fails Before It Starts,” I made the point that real consensus isn’t built in the room, it’s built in the conversations leading up to it. This article picks up that thread by digging into what those conversations actually need to accomplish.

Many projects involve multiple departments, meaning there is no one stakeholder who can simply force decisions. Without the authority to make decisions, the project leader needs to rely on influence instead. When everyone has a common goal, that should be easy. It turns out agreeing on a destination is only the first step.

A goal isn’t the same as an agreement

Everyone wants to jump into moving a project forward, so once a common goal is reached, people start taking action. Teams rarely spend enough time making the goal crystal clear. There’s a big difference between understanding the overall goal and knowing all the criteria for what a successful project looks like. The more time teams spend defining the goal, the less time and money it usually takes to achieve it.

Project management’s classic “iron triangle” helps explain why: every project balances three constraints, scope, time, and cost, and pursuing one too hard quietly undermines the others. That’s true even when everyone agrees on the stated goal, because the goal alone doesn’t say how those three constraints should be weighed against each other. Each stakeholder fills in that gap with their own assumptions about which priorities matter most.

More stakeholders, more hidden priorities

The project team includes multiple divisions, each of which has its own priorities. Sales and accounting rarely define success the same way. Within those divisions are people with differing personalities. Some prioritize measurable outcomes, while others prioritize upholding core values. Large projects often involve multiple companies, making things exponentially more complicated. Being a project lead with the responsibility of successful completion, without the authority to enforce decisions, can feel like an uphill fight.

What happens without agreement

It can feel like having a common goal is enough to start a project. At the end, when the goal is complete, some stakeholders think it was successful while others think it’s a failure. Perhaps it finished on time, but was over budget. Maybe the outcome was perfect, but it pulled resources from another project causing that one to be late. The main goal contains many smaller criteria, and everyone needs to agree on how those criteria should be prioritized before work starts.

The best way to understand what everyone truly wants is to ask a few questions such as:

• What would make this a win for your department?
• What key performance indicators are you measuring?
• What one thing needs to be avoided for you to consider this a success?

Sometimes you’ll need to ask what success looks like in more than one way to get a full understanding.

No project is too small

I was one of four families who wanted to go on a vacation together. “Have a fun vacation that everyone can enjoy” was the goal, but we didn’t stop there. None of us had authority over the others, so this only worked because everyone bought into the process voluntarily. We got into a room with a whiteboard and mapped out the criteria: price, weather, ease of transportation, activities, food, and amenities. Each family weighted every category by how important it was to them, then scored each destination from 1 to 10 against every category. We multiplied each score by its weight, and the destination with the highest total won. Everyone recognized that the system might miss something, so each family was able to veto any destination if they could explain why it was such a problem for them.

We started this whole exercise because we found it amusing. Partway through, we realized just how useful it was for finding something that would make everyone happy. It may not have been strictly necessary to go through all of this for a vacation. Even so, the vacation far surpassed what any of us had expected. Don’t limit this kind of priority-setting to critical projects. It only takes a little extra time, and it will make any project more successful.

It doesn’t solve everything

Defining the criteria within the main goal, and agreeing on their priority, will alleviate many problems and help ensure success. That doesn’t mean there won’t be issues. Situations are always changing and new information will surface, but having clearly defined criteria up front makes it easier to notice those changes and handle them appropriately. The next article will dive further into handling those unforeseen obstacles as they arise.

If your team is struggling to get real stakeholder alignment on a project, I’d love to talk about how a workshop, keynote, or coaching engagement could help. Reach out here.