Are My Deliverables Ready for Stakeholder Review?

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Are My Deliverables Ready for Stakeholder ReviewTo gain buy-in and kick off organizational change practices, hold stakeholder reviews of project deliverables early in the lifecycle. That builds trust, saves time, and creates excitement for project outcomes, which promotes product acceptance. Reviewing project deliverables too early can have the opposite effect, reducing confidence and generating anxiety about change. Here’s how to ensure your project deliverables are ready for stakeholders’ scrutiny.

  • Is a deliverable more content than concept? Rough outlines, placeholders for design elements, or incomplete code logic are not enough for a stakeholder review. First impressions are important—they’re hard to overcome if they go off the rails. If you have to explain what’s going on, stakeholders might doubt the project purpose and the team’s competence or direction. Hold a stakeholder review only when the work is complete enough that no explanations are needed and the team is in synch with what’s been done so far.
  • The team agrees on the status of the deliverable. Make sure the entire team is comfortable with the deliverable and its purpose. If the team is confused or debates the scope, design, or priorities, that uncertainty will rub off on stakeholders. For a stakeholder review, you want clear agreement on what the deliverable will deliver, requirements, initial design, and priorities. The presentation should run like a well-oiled machine.
  • Assumptions are validated (that is the assumption is now a known answer). Most projects start with significant assumptions about stakeholder needs, technical feasibility, or integration approaches. It’s risky to review a deliverable when those assumptions aren’t validated, because changes to assumptions mean wasted time, rework and reduced trust.
  • Stakeholders with a “work in progress” mindset are available. You want stakeholders who are comfortable seeing works in progress, who aren’t bothered by wireframes, proofs of concept, or drafts. Don’t show unfinished prototypes to detail-oriented stakeholders. You’ll distract them from what truly matters and mess up your timeline with more stakeholder management tasks.
  • The team has defined the feedback they want. A big part of a deliverable review meeting is to get feedback on what the team has put together so far. If the team doesn’t know what input they want, that lack of focus could result in opinions that muddy rather than clarify the way forward.

Make a checklist for what needs to be in place before you schedule a stakeholder review. That way, you can be sure that the review positions a deliverable for success. 

For more about stakeholder management, check out Natasha Kasimtseva’s Managing Project Stakeholders course.

 

Coming Up

Starting a new Project Manager role comes with a lot to navigate, new teams, new expectations, and the pressure to lead early. Join Anna Anderson and I for Office Hours on Friday, January 16, 2026 @ 12pm MT/1PM CT for a live conversation on what really helps new PMs settle into their role with confidence. This session is ideal for first-time PMs, career transitioners, and recently promoted project managers. Click here to join!

 

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This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 101,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library and tune into my LinkedIn Office Hours live broadcasts.

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Why Tracking Internal Staffing Costs is Important

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Why Tracking Internal Staffing Costs is ImportantOrganizations often treat internal staffing as “free,” thinking that existing salaries don’t affect the project’s bottom line. Not so! That approach distorts the view of project viability and staff capacity and undermines the accuracy of long-term planning. Here are several ways that tracking internal staff costs is beneficial.

  • Tracking internal staff costs recognizes that time is money. A lot of money. Whether a team member is on the payroll or a contract, time is money. If an engineer spends fifty hours on a project, that’s fifty hours they aren’t working on something else. That’s often referred to as opportunity cost. An accurate picture of these time/money trade-offs is the foundation for strategic decisions about workload priority and overall spending. Tracking in-house team members’ time isn’t micromanaging; it’s understanding where your organization’s most limited resource is really going.
  • It shows the true cost of a project. Projects appear less expensive on paper when internal time isn’t counted. But considering the meetings, troubleshooting, and coordination that salaried staff handle, the “free” project resource becomes very costly. Capturing that time and effort keeps cost estimates honest and makes your reporting more credible when you must justify spending.
  • It enhances resource planning and forecasting. Tracking time spent by internal team members helps management identify who is overloaded, under-allocated, and which functions require the most effort. That data reduces guesswork and increases insight of performance. Future planning becomes sharper, and the team avoids burnout because hidden workload becomes visible.
  • It strengthens project accountability. When all project work hours are tracked, people become more aware of task switching and time spent on non-critical work. It amplifies the need for shared accountability. Time tracking helps everyone see the financial impact of their work on the bottom line, encouraging collaboration across teams.
  • It reveals the true return on investment (ROI) of a project. Without staffing costs, you can’t measure a project’s return on investment. People might think that a project was delivered under budget, but factoring in internal time can tell a different story. Tracking staffing costs supports legitimate comparisons of projects, and better decisions about where to invest the next dollar or person-hour.

For more about project finances, check out Bob McGannon’s Project Management Foundations: Budgets course.

 

Coming Up

Starting a new Project Manager role comes with a lot to navigate, new teams, new expectations, and the pressure to lead early. Join Anna Anderson and I for Office Hours on Friday, January 16, 2026 @ 12pm MT/1PM CT for a live conversation on what really helps new PMs settle into their role with confidence. This session is ideal for first-time PMs, career transitioners, and recently promoted project managers. Click here to join!

 

_______________________________________

This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 101,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library and tune into my LinkedIn Office Hours live broadcasts.

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