Are you facing problems in managing stakeholders? Here are 5 tips to help you manage them better. But before that let us understand and clarify what we mean by a stakeholder. As per the PMBOK 5, a stakeholder is an individual, group, or organisation who may affect, be affected by, or perceive itself to be affected by a decision, activity, or outcome of a project. So, a stakeholder is someone who may be actively involved in the project or have interests that may be positively or negatively affected by the performance or completion of the project. Stakeholders may also exert influence over the project or its deliverables. Having said that, it is important to understand who can be stakeholders. As a matter of fact, every one involved with the project is a stakeholder… and that includes the project manager, project team members, project management team, the sponsors, the execution team, and the support teams and so on and so on. But in all this, we forget a key stakeholder… the very customer for whom the project is being executed.Keeping this in mind, here are 5 important things you MUST keep in mind to ensure that every stakeholder is managed well.
1) Ensure that you analyse your stakeholders to understand their importance and most importantly how they impact the project in various stages of the project. For this, you may use different techniques like power / interest grids, power/ influence grids etc to help clearly map them in to distinct categories.
2) Ensure that you maintain a proper stakeholder register. This may not be too formal, but should definitely contain important information such as Stakeholder assessment and their classification in terms of internal/external, supportive/neutral/resistor. This can help and go a long way in deciding the strategy for managing the stakeholders.
3) Focus on key areas around the stakeholders, such as the stakeholder’s desired and current engagement levels, scope and impact of the project changes on the stakeholders, communication across stakeholders and the information to be shared with different stakeholders.
4) Engage the stakeholder at appropriate project stages based on the plan above, manage the stakeholder expectations, and address potential concerns.
5) Finally, do not ignore the stakeholders that are silent or are not actively participating. Sometimes, such stakeholders are crucial and have important influence over the project and ignoring them can be critical for the project’s success.