Agile reporting for effective stakeholder management

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Effective stakeholder management is essential in an Agile-focused company. Stakeholders could be customers, users, managers, business owners, peers, or any community affected by the project.

While projects involve delivering outcomes at every stage, the project success finally rests on the way people work together and how well the stakeholder expectations are managed and met. Stakeholder management involves identifying stakeholders, analyzing their expectations, coordinating interactions, and improving relationships.

As a Product Owner, knowing how to engage stakeholders throughout the project's life-cycle is an important communication skill for efficient collaboration, establishing mutual trust, and creating a positive work environment for your Scrum teams.

The right amount of stakeholder involvement provides business context for project goals, helps unblock issues, and moves projects forward with quick resolutions.

Here are some examples of how to smartly engage stakeholders:

Engage stakeholders with agile reporting

Most stakeholders often do not have enough time to track progress minutely. Hence, Product Owners must provide quick snapshots of the team's progress via agile reports to give stakeholders a clear picture of the project status and establish a shared product vision.

To ensure transparency and effectively utilize agile reports for better project outcomes, the agile reports for stakeholders must accurately reflect the project status. Unfortunately, many Product Owners mistakenly assume that reports should always 'look good' to the stakeholder. This mindset is counterproductive, as engaged and informed stakeholders can eliminate roadblocks and mitigate project risks by providing holistic and external insights into the product.

Engage stakeholders with Jira time tracking

Agile reports play a crucial role in effective stakeholder management by actively engaging the stakeholders. Most agile teams use Jira for project management. With time tracking and reporting apps that effortlessly and seamlessly build on Jira, Product Owners can access detailed and accurate reports within minutes.

These apps allow Product Owners to track progress, generate visual reports and share various agile reporting metrics like epic and release burndown, velocity, cumulative flow, value delivered, etc., with stakeholders. This allows stakeholders increased visibility into the project and helps them track whether projects are on time and budget compared to company-wide annual plans.

Engaged stakeholders can provide business intelligence and context around project goals and requirements. They can also make critical decisions to remove roadblocks, leading to better-performing projects. Effective stakeholder management with detailed and accurate agile reports can be an excellent asset for your project's overall success.