Misalignment within stakeholders

Alignment with stakeholders for things like expectations and priorities is incredibly important (citation needed).  Indeed, it takes up most of my time as a project manager as a misunderstanding here can lead to poor outcome (at best).  While this can be challenging, at least project managers have some control over it; we can communicate with those stakeholders to ID and set those expectations.  The harder challenges come from misalignment within stakeholders.

Imagine a scenario where you agree on a set of priorities with your main stakeholder.  Your team executes on that, and then provides the final deliverables on time.  And then things go sideways.  It turns out what you delivered wasn't what was really needed.. despite being what was agreed on with your stakeholder.  You and your team might rightfully be confused as to what happened… after all, everything was agreed on and delivered on time.

Despite that agreement, it turns out you weren't working on what was really needed because your stakeholders weren't aligned.  This misalignment could be because stakeholders at the same level didn't align with each other (for example two managers on the same team), or it could be because management above whomever you worked with had a different set of priorities (a manager and their director).  Regardless, you and your team have delivered the wrong thing and may take a reputation hit because of it.

At the surface level this seems to be a problem for your stakeholder to solve.  After all, THEY weren't aligned.  At its core, however, this relates to not properly engaging your stakeholder group.  It's possible you didn't properly ID who you should speak with, or maybe you did, but then didn't share enough information.

This risk can be mitigated by ensuring your RACI is as complete as possible (especially the Inform group), and ensuring you communicate out priorities for your next Sprint / project / etc.  Personally I tend to share this with my stakeholders leadership as an FYI on a regular basis (monthly or quarterly depending on the group), just to ensure they've at least received this information.  At worst it's adding an extra email address, at best, it saves a TON of headache.