Intro to Stakeholder Management: The Key Principles

Project stakeholder management describes the process of identifying people, groups, or organizations that can impact, or will be impacted, by the results of a given project. It’s used to analyze expectations, collect feedback, and develop management and engagement strategies to involve those parties in key decision stages.

Proper stakeholder engagement and management is arguably the most important aspects of successfully delivering a project on time and budget. These aspects are often pushed to the lowest positions on many project managers’ to-do lists. They are even delegated to a less experienced team member, which is a big mistake.

The truth is that the success of a project is directly linked to and depends on those actually involved in the project. It’s up to these participants to make any adjustments along the way and to produce the benefits that the project is aimed to deliver. After all, the project is meant to accomplish something that matters and holds value to various stakeholders including customers, suppliers, business partners and a whole lot of other people. If you can’t satisfy their primary demands, chances are your project’s success will be short-lived.

How to approach stakeholder management?

Stakeholder management doesn’t necessarily have to be time-consuming and tiring to be effective. On the contrary, you should think of it as a means to make adjustments and improvements to your plan. This will eventually help you deliver a result that is highly expected and welcomed by all impacted parties.

Maintaining continuous relationships and updating key stakeholders regularly is a great way to accomplish this. It’s important to understand that while stakeholders will most likely share their opinion if they are engaged with the project at a certain level, not all of their comments need to be considered.

Oftentimes, stakeholders can’t understand advanced technical details or why their suggestions can’t be implemented. It is in your best interest to patiently explain all of these things. At the same time, being open to ideas and considering the most useful ones is a good strategy. This will give you a chance to look at the project and features from a different angle. It also showcases you in the stakeholders’ eyes as a caring project manager that is doing their best to listen to feedback.

Furthermore, you don’t need to take into consideration each and every stakeholder’s opinion, as that may require an absurd amount of time and resources. One of the best approaches is to split stakeholders into focus groups of about 3-5 people based on the stages of your project and continue from there.

Key principles

1. The project manager is always responsible for managing stakeholders

Never try to delegate this task to other team members unless you absolutely have to. For one, stakeholder management should be an ongoing process where you discuss and share views and opinions with involved parties on a consistent basis. It would be highly counter-productive to delegate this job to somebody else.

Secondly, team members may not be able to correctly deliver the vision, mission, purpose, scope, risks and mechanisms of your project. This is particularly important during the early stages, as it may lead to unnecessary confusion or even tension. Finally, you’re the one responsible for the success of the project. It’s in your best interest to manage these meetings personally.

2. Your project is substantially more likely to succeed if you implement stakeholder management

Parties like founders, partners, and suppliers are people who control and manage finances. They are more likely to support your project and dedicate sufficient resources to it if they are engaged with it.

Furthermore, frequent meetings and discussions will help everyone understand the ins and outs of the project. This allows you to predict their reaction to a certain extent, with each successive stage or feature that you add.

3. Prioritize stakeholders correctly

At some point, you will inevitably face issues related to stakeholder values. This is where you will need to prioritize stakeholders carefully based on their personalities, your past experience, and the purpose of the project.

From the stakeholder’s point of view, there are generally three types of project variables that should be prioritized by a given group: time, cost, and scope. A stakeholder’s judgment is based on what they need most or on what they believe is important to the project. Based on which stakeholders are most important to your project’s success, prioritize their needs and develop a communication plan to continuously engage with them and earn their support.

The stakeholder management process

Keeping the key principles in mind, here is a great way to picture the management process:

1. Identifying project stakeholders

The first step is to identify project stakeholders regularly, analyze their values, beliefs, and feedback while documenting relevant information. Also, continuously tweak the project to best suit their needs and interests whenever possible and without causing harm or increasing project risk. After this, prioritize stakeholders based on their values and unique project aspects to determine the most important parties to engage with continuously.

It’s very important to approach the identification process as an ongoing process. This is because often, key stakeholders emerge at later stages, forcing you to shift your priorities accordingly.

2. Planning stakeholder engagement and meetings

Just like in the case of your project, you will need to come up with a communication plan for how to interact with stakeholders based on their needs, expectations, values and impact. The plan can be flexible depending on the individual case. For example, you could choose to communicate with stakeholders every day, or once a month. Furthermore, creating a plan will help you stay organized and keep on top of meetings. You can also make changes to your approach as needed.

An easy-to-use project management software like Wrike, EasyProjects or Monday can come in very handy here. You can take all the stakeholder suggestions in any sections and pin the most important requests to your dashboard. Additionally, you can assign them to appropriate team members with due dates and deadlines. You can even use those tools to hold group video calls while taking notes and making changes to corresponding project stages on the fly.

3. Managing stakeholder engagement

Once you’ve identified and planned your approach, it’s time for implementation. Stick to your plan, listen to feedback, take notes, consider the reasonable requests and demands, and adapt your plan accordingly. If you decide to implement a suggestion, always make sure to get in touch with the given stakeholder(s) as soon as possible after implementation. Double-check that you understood their request and implemented everything as envisioned.

4. Monitoring stakeholder management

Lastly, monitoring stakeholder management involves fostering healthy business relationships with key stakeholders and making sure that you have their support. This is especially important if you find it unsuitable to implement their suggestions or requests. In that case, you need to explain why their request(s) can’t be fitted into the project scope and how it impacts the end result. The more attention and care you show, the more trust and support you will gain.

Conclusion

Though it is often time-consuming, stakeholder management is highly flexible and unique to each project and project manager. It depends on project goals and purposes and what you’re trying to achieve as a result. Always keep the 3 key principles of stakeholder management in mind. Don’t be afraid to try a few approaches to determine the one that will work for your specific case.

Interested in learning more about project management? Find out the top reasons why projects tend to fail and how to manage your project’s risk factors.