Effective stakeholder management: Engaging and communicating with key players

According to Team Stage, 50% of people state stakeholder engagement is the most valuable project management process. Stakeholder management is crucial for ensuring a project is aligned with stakeholder needs and expectations, reducing resistance and increasing the chances of success.

Stakeholder management vs stakeholder engagement

Often used interchangeably, stakeholder management and stakeholder engagement are different concepts.

Stakeholder management is the wider process of systematically identifying, analysing, planning and implementing actions to engage with stakeholders. Whereas stakeholder engagement is the process of actively involving stakeholders in projects through communication and strong relationships.

Stakeholder engagement is a core component of stakeholder management.

The importance of effective stakeholder management

Effective stakeholder management plays a significant role in completing a project on budget, on time and within scope. There are several reasons stakeholder management is an important skill, including:

• Builds long-term relationships that could lead to future collaboration
• Enhances decision making
• Ensures projects are aligned with stakeholder expectations
• Ensures the project is successful, achieves its goals and improves outcomes
• Improves risk identification and mitigation
• Increases communication helping to foster trust and collaboration
• Optimises resource allocation
• And more!

Steps for successful stakeholder management

Set project objectives

Consider your wider project objectives, what are you hoping to achieve? Once these are confirmed, it is important to think about the impact stakeholders are likely to have on these objectives. How much influence does their input have on the likelihood of success?

Identify and map out your stakeholders

Create a full list of stakeholders involved in your project, make sure you consider anyone that you are likely to need to manage or engage with throughout. Once you have this list, map out all individuals into groupings based on levels of interest and influence. This will allow you to identify your key players.

Build a strategy

Take your learnings from the previous two steps, and consider the best ways to approach each stakeholder. Take into account their preferred style of communication and how to effectively manage this. Then build a strategy which outlines the plan for stakeholder engagement, who will be managing relationships, at what stages will you provide updates on progress, and which stakeholders will be involved in the decision-making process?

Assign resources and responsibilities

What resources do you have available to manage stakeholders? Identify the members of your team that will be responsible for stakeholder engagement, and communicate the strategy to them.

Maintain regular communication and manage relationships

Maintaining relationships with your stakeholders throughout the course of a project is vital for ensuring they feel involved and engaged. While it may take time to build these relationships it will be worth it when you start to reap the rewards.

Monitor and report

Create a process for monitoring and reporting on interactions with stakeholders, particularly those where you handled situations of conflict. This information will be extremely valuable when considering lessons learned at the end of the project.

Enhancing your stakeholder management skills with PRINCE2

A certification like PRINCE2 can help provide a structured approach for stakeholder management.

Source: prince2.com