Richard Stobart kicked off our SpeedAgile webinar series, with the first session: ‘Speed up stakeholder communication and sign off’.

In this 30-minute webinar, Richard explored:

• Rapidly engaging and building confidence with your stakeholders
  
• Creating momentum on the features you really need
  
• Applying communication ceremonies that give everyone clarity
  
• Helping slice through a complex stakeholder decision-making unit
  
  

Listen to the full audio of the session:

The session slides:

Topics covered included:

• Getting communication going between stakeholders at the start of the process and getting sign off at the end
  
• Beginning a journey with stakeholders
  
• Engaging people within the journey
  
• Starting with the basics, before ramping up
  
• The “Development Sausage Machine”
  
• Taking feedback on board and using this
  
• The various different types of stakeholders
  
• Measuring though t-shirt sizing for value
  
  

Other insights shared:

• Take your stakeholders on a journey, increase their level of comfort and build trust so they trust what you say – as this relationship builds and improves, then get them excited
  
• Go as fast as you can, take risks but land safely
  
• Put the person in an environment where they can learn as fast as possible, and don’t feel out of their depth
  
• You don’t want to be in a situation where stakeholders feel like they’re fighting you all the time and they aren’t being heard
  
• Once your stakeholders are engaged, you can take off the training wheels and hand it over to them – you’ve taken them through a secure, safe process
  
• The most critical thing is continual improvement
  
  

Increase stakeholder’s level of comfort and build trust. As the relationship improves, get them excited. @richardstobart #SpeedAgile

— Unboxed Consulting (@Ubxd) June 24, 2015

Engaging stakeholders with Agile - make it safe, fun and give them a bit of control (like learning to ride a bike!) #speedagile

— Carrie Bedingfield (@CBedingfield) June 24, 2015

Put in your highest value items, in small bite-size chunks, to get them into production as soon as possible. @richardstobart #SpeedAgile

— Unboxed Consulting (@Ubxd) June 24, 2015

If you have a trail of failed projects, you have to build trust early on with stakeholders #SpeedAgile

— Carrie Bedingfield (@CBedingfield) June 24, 2015

Get REAL feedback to start making a REAL impact. @richardstobart #SpeedAgile

— Unboxed Consulting (@Ubxd) June 24, 2015

You want a feature to be small enough so it can be justified to the other stakeholders in the room. @richardstobart #SpeedAgile

— Unboxed Consulting (@Ubxd) June 24, 2015

Join us for our next sessions:

We still have two more sessions in the SpeedAgile webinar series over the next few weeks – get your place now.

If you have any questions on this topic, or any topic similar to this, tweet us with the hashtag #AgileSpeed at @Ubxd, or tweet Richard directly at @richardstobart – we’d love to hear from you.