Managing the Stakeholders

Project failure is mostly linked to the no attention to detail or straying from the stakeholder’s instructions. You need to collaborate with your stakeholders and keep in touch with them throughout the project lifecycle to ensure the successful completion of the project. Managing your stakeholder is all about maintaining good relationships with each team member involved in the project.

Communicating your ideas, the current progress of the project, your budget, timeline, and other factors with your stakeholders is key to completing a project efficiently. In this post, we will walk you through effective stakeholder management strategies and why it’s needed. Let’s get started.

What is Stakeholder Management?

No matter the size and complexity of the project, a single person can’t handle every aspect of project management. You must work with investors, employees, business associates, advertisers, and project managers to keep everything in order. A stakeholder is someone who has invested in your project, someone you have sourced your resources from, or anyone who’s affected by the progress of your project.

Simply put, stakeholder management is the process of working according to your stakeholder’s requirements and instructions. You need to involve these people in every stage, from planning to project execution. In addition to the parties mentioned above, government agencies, suppliers, and external customers can be your stakeholders.

How to Build a Stakeholder Management Plan?

A stakeholder management plan is a management process where you identify the key stakeholders for the project and determine how you will communicate your business goals with them. The plan identifies the stakeholders by listing their contact information, status, and how they affect your business. Let’s take a look at the step−by−step process for developing a stakeholder management plan.

Identify your Stakeholders

As mentioned earlier, the planning starts with listing each stakeholder involved in the project or affected by its results. It doesn’t include people who will invest in your business, but everyone who’s interested in your project’s outcome is considered a stakeholder. If you don’t have their contact details yet, just note their names or company details.

Prioritize your Stakeholders

The next step is conducting a stakeholder analysis to determine their status and role in your organization. You can use an onion diagram to get a clear picture of what influence they have on your project and how important it is to satisfy each. Based on this, you can set your priorities. Put each name in different categories after evaluating the power they have over your project.

Once you are done with this, you will know which stakeholder you should spend most of your time with. Those who are in the high−power quadrant are the key players. You need to keep them informed about your project’s status throughout the lifecycle of the project. Those who are in the low−power quadrant don’t require a high−level engagement, nor do you have to call them after hitting every milestone. They also need a report on the end results.

Interview Them

Interview each stakeholder to identify their unique requirements, how they’d like you to execute the project, what’s the ideal timeline, how much budget you should allocate to the raw materials and human resources, and what outcome they expect. Understanding the stakeholder’s expectations will give you a better idea of which resources you need for the project and which members you should delegate your responsibilities to. While you are at it, ask about their concerns or any special instructions.

Manage Expectations

Once you know your stakeholders’ requirements, it’s easier to plan a strategy for managing their expectations. You need to come up with a plan to communicate regularly with every stakeholder, especially those in the high−power quadrant. Think about how you will keep them up−to−date with the project’s status.

Why Use Software for Managing Stakeholders?

Identifying different stakeholders, prioritizing them based on their contribution to the project, and communicating your business goals with them can get pretty tricky. Using a software application for managing your stakeholders, projects, and other tasks in a single centralized system can make the management process a whole lot easier and more efficient.

Set a schedule

The stakeholder management software allows you to create a schedule for every task. It also creates a space where your team and the people involved in the project can share their input. The easy−access features promote excellent collaboration.

Assign work

Once you have set the schedule, the next step is to decide who should work on the project. Remember, no schedule makes sense until the process is executed properly. Your stakeholders won’t be involved in this phase of project management. Still, it’s better to provide them the “view access” so they can know who’s assigned which role.

Monitoring progress

If you have used stakeholder management software, you know how it comes packed with robust features and reports that show you the progress clearly. The software has a clean and organized dashboard that gives your stakeholders insights into the number of tasks you have finished, how much it will take for your team to finish the project, how it is progressing, whether you are on the budget and the timeline, etc.

Balance workload

Nothing exhausts your employees more than when they are overburdened with tasks they can’t handle. Your stakeholders might not know the qualifications and experience of your employees and whether they are qualified to work on the assigned tasks. Only a project manager and the HR department can tell the employees’ competency. Using stakeholder management software, you can see whether your employees are assigned duties based on their area of specialization. You can reduce employees’ workflow by distributing the duties equally among each employee.

Conclusion

Identifying and categorizing each stakeholder into internal and external members can help you follow their instructions closely and meet their expectations. The power interest grid gives you a clear picture of which stakeholders are the key players. Communicate your project’s progress with these members regularly. And use software apps to streamline stakeholders’ management and employees’ workload and generate reports for the project.