We have a very strong stakeholder who ends up creating chaos and those on her team can't contain it, so it just spreads. Here's some examples of the problems I've just inherited :

1. Our PM is now the biggest risk to following any kind of decent project management process because she can't get herself to push back against such a strong persona, so the developers are interrupted every day BY THE PM to rearrange priorities to place new work that is bypassing the standard prioritization process, and delay work the greater business needs done for a major project.

2. While we can't get budget to grow our development team, that stakeholder has somehow got budget to hire consultants as a shadow development team to bypass the greater prioritization process with other stakeholders, despite agreeing not to do this a day earlier. She expects them to do unchecked work in our system, which would destabilize the system for all.

3. Meanwhile that stakeholder has only not controlled all work priorities for 1 two week sprint. The other major business units have been waiting for 18 months while we worked on her big project, so they're all trying to knock down the proverbial door to get their work prioritized.

4. The developers lose time due to all of these, and I'm now going to lose all development time to go try to manage this chaos.

Here's what I think so far:

If we had real project management this wouldn't be an issue. I've been down this road before. If we follow, STRICTLY follow, a framework (like agile scrum) then everyone has clear expectations, we stop slowing down development with interruptions of new priorities and trying to secretly prep work for a shadow developement team.

All development happens the same way, following this process, so if they can find additional temporary (contracted) resources, then they just add to our bandwidth and we get more done FROM THE SAME prioritized backlog.