So, it is vital to diligently communicate and engage with them and cater to their expectations throughout the project.<\/p>\n
However, stakeholder management<\/strong> is easier said than done and sometimes turns out to be an arduous job for even seasoned project managers<\/a>.<\/p>\n PMI\u2019s research<\/a> also reveals the same:<\/p>\n Only 36% of leaders could secure their project stakeholders\u2019 and key staff\u2019s buy-in around the project\u2019s aims and benefits very well. This blog explains why effective stakeholder management matters and the best practices to achieve that.<\/p>\n But first, let\u2019s start by understanding:<\/p>\n PMI defines<\/a> stakeholders as:<\/p>\n Individuals and organizations who are actively involved in the project, or whose interests may be positively or negatively affected as a result of project execution or completion.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n In other words, an individual with a \u201cstake\u201d in a project and can either influence it or be influenced by its outcome is a stakeholder. For example, if you create a website for a client, the business owner (your client) is a key stakeholder. Therefore, it\u2019s important to understand their requirements<\/a>, develop the website accordingly, make any feasible changes requested, and convey progress regularly. It is because they may disapprove certain features or elements and even reject the website itself if it doesn\u2019t meet their expectations, leading to a project failure.<\/p>\n Given the basic definition of a stakeholder, let\u2019s understand its types.<\/p>\n Individuals or parties that are a part of an organization and are directly involved in a project are called internal stakeholders. Examples are the project manager and team, sponsor(s), and other internal staff like the sales or marketing team.<\/p>\n Individuals or parties that are not a part of the organization but may or may not be directly involved in a project are called external stakeholders. However, the project can affect them, or they can indirectly impact it. Examples are clients, suppliers, communities, shareholders, end-users, government, creditors, etc.<\/p>\n Now that the types of stakeholders are clear, let\u2019s learn how to identify them.<\/p>\n Not every stakeholder has the same degree of influence or interest in the project. Moreover, the project’s outcome may not impact them to the same extent. Thus, project stakeholder identification and prioritization become imperative.<\/p>\n It will also ensure that you don\u2019t leave out any stakeholders and face their disagreement at a later stage. Once the identification is done, it will help you determine the level of effort required with each one based on their priority order.<\/p>\n An influence\/interest chart is one of the best ways to identify, visualize, and prioritize stakeholders involved. Let\u2019s understand it better with an example of the construction of an entertainment park. Here, the owner has the highest stake in terms of influence and interest. Further, government authorities may not be interested but can exert their authority to halt the construction work in case of a failure to seek requisite approvals<\/a>. On the other hand, despite having no direct influence, nearby residents may show interest as it may open new entertainment and business opportunities.<\/p>\n So, the influence\/interest chart can be created as follows:<\/p>\n The next step after stakeholders\u2019 identification is their management.<\/p>\n The following section explains why it is crucial.<\/p>\n As already mentioned, effective project stakeholder management<\/strong> is integral for successful project delivery. Managing their expectations and demands is essential as they hold control over various aspects, including funding, resources, approvals, knowledge, etc.<\/p>\n Besides, they have experience in the given industry, and some are subject matter experts. Thus, they can guide the project managers and help them determine deliverables, project constraints<\/a>, and associated risks<\/a>. Their valuable insights and support increase the probability of a project\u2019s success exponentially. Moreover, if one fails to engage these key stakeholders and fulfill their expectations, they may withdraw their consent, leading to the project\u2019s failure.<\/p>\n The best example is your client, who may disapprove or cancel the project if it fails to meet their requirements in any aspect. It may not only cause your business loss but also hamper your company\u2019s reputation. So, keeping them thoroughly involved, updated, and engaged is critical to ensure a project\u2019s success.<\/p>\n The following section explains the best practices to do that.<\/p>\n If you fail to deal with project stakeholders<\/strong> properly, it may pose challenges like disagreement, withdrawal of consent, differences in perspectives, etc. Nevertheless, following the right strategies can help a project manager convince the stakeholders and get them on board.<\/p>\n Here are a few proven tactics to achieve the same:<\/p>\n From project initiation to execution and its closure, stakeholders play a vital role at every stage. For instance, a project plan<\/a><\/strong> will be inconducive without understanding their expectation before the outset. Thus,<\/p>\n Conducting meetings with stakeholders is imperative for managers to ensure that the project plan aligns with the final deliverables.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n After the project\u2019s approval and initiation, conducting regular meetings with them to convey the progress is equally important. It helps determine if anything has changed in terms of priorities, requirements, etc. It will help managers to realign their efforts before it\u2019s too late. Additionally, conveying bottlenecks proactively also helps sustain trust and transparency<\/a> and mitigate issues at the right time. In the end, getting all the project closure documents signed off prevents last-minute disagreements and conflicts around final deliverables.<\/p>\n Once you create a work breakdown structure<\/strong> and define milestones<\/a>, seeking stakeholders\u2019 concurrence is critical to ensure they are on the same page. It\u2019s all the more essential when you are working on a long and complex project involving multiple phases where deliverables are defined stage-wise. For instance, software development<\/a> may consist of multiple iterations with different features in each release.<\/p>\n Thus, if you create milestones and seek approvals for these features before every release, it helps keep the design and its completion in line with the expectations. Naturally, failure to take this approach may result in a mismatch between final deliverables and expectations, resulting in rework, budget\/time overruns, etc. On the other hand, doing so will keep the stakeholder\u2019s trust intact and help you build rapport with them.<\/p>\n As discussed earlier, regularizing the communication about the project\u2019s progress helps strengthen trust and faith. Hence, the onus lies on a project manager to convey regular updates about the accomplishment of milestones at every stage. It will help reduce discrepancies and ensure that the project\u2019s course<\/a> is in line with stakeholders\u2019 expectations at every stage.<\/p>\n Further, reporting challenges and issues faced during the course of the project is also necessary. It helps brainstorm and work out the ways to eliminate the hindrances with valuable inputs, suggestions, and support from project stakeholders<\/strong>. Moreover, transparency about issues negates any room for impractical expectations and builds your credibility. This eventually ensures the successful completion of a project in the desired manner.<\/p>\n Risks and challenges are inherent to every project. Thus, giving a false scenario to the stakeholders and conveying it will be a smooth ride all along will lead to unrealistic expectations. Therefore, a project manager should compile the risks involved and convey them transparently at the approval stage and forewarn the stakeholders. To build a risk chart, one can pair their experience with systematic methods like assumption analysis, risk matrix<\/a>, cause and effect diagrams, etc., to identify and prioritize risks.<\/p>\n Based on that, you should focus first on the high-priority and critical risks and inform stakeholders about them. It will also help you build a solid risk mitigation or a contingency plan<\/strong> beforehand. Moreover, after the project starts, managers should proactively track these risks to prevent them from turning into issues.<\/p>\n As already clear, it is important to inform key stakeholders as soon as any risk \u2013 minor or major turns into an issue. It implies that a project manager should not adopt the \u201cwait and watch\u201d policy and convey it only when it exceeds the manageable threshold. In addition to that, getting approval from stakeholders before implementing a mitigation plan is imperative too. Or else, it may lead to conflicts and discrepancies later.<\/p>\n Moreover, when stakeholders notice that you are not only conveying the issues but are also actively participating in handling them, it enhances their trust and engagement. Thus, it becomes easier to seek stakeholder buy-in<\/strong> and support to expedite the issue-resolving measures. This will help boost the goodwill between you and them even further.<\/p>\n Anything that transforms or influences a project, tasks involved, processes, structures, or even final deliverables at any stage is called a change. Let\u2019s assume that your team is building a business app for a company. The client requests the addition of two functionalities that were not initially agreed upon. Failing to accommodate this request properly may lead to disagreements and disappointment.<\/p>\n To avoid this, the project manager should follow the change management<\/a> framework that lays down the guidelines to handle such change requests. They should approach the Change Control Board<\/strong>, a body of senior internal stakeholders that reviews suggestions by clients. Discussing these change requests with the CCB will help examine the impact of the ad-hoc changes on the project delivery and incorporate them if deemed feasible. Moreover, a disciplined approach to incorporate changes will minimize room for any unfeasible requests or conflicts.<\/p>\n Not every stakeholder is easy to convince. Some of them are skeptical of the projects and may give you a difficult time. Thus, tackling with them may require extra effort and patience.<\/p>\n A project manager should take appropriate initiatives based on the type of \u201cdifficult\u201d stakeholder.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Let\u2019s look at some categories and ways to handle them.<\/p>\n Micromanagers<\/strong> \u2013 They may try to control all the aspects of a project. Assigning senior team members to \u201cdeflect\u201d their queries politely and tactfully can help manage them.<\/p>\n Pushies<\/strong> \u2013 They want to churn the maximum out of the minimum investment, tighten the timelines, or expand the scope<\/a>. The project manager here should take a firm stance without accepting their \u201cunrealistic\u201d demands unless they show more flexibility and support.<\/p>\n Skeptics<\/strong> – They question the team\u2019s ability and the project\u2019s progress. Delivering on commitments consistently and giving regular demos to show real-time progress is the key to gaining their trust.<\/p>\n Idlers<\/strong> \u2013 They are highly concerned about the project\u2019s progress but fail to provide the requirements at the right time, leading to disruptions and issues. To handle them, managers need to stay in constant touch, send regular reminders, track and update requirements and milestones regularly.<\/p>\n Saboteurs<\/strong> \u2013 These form the hardest category of stakeholders to deal with and may start working against your project due to their personal or political motives. An approach to win back their consent is by demonstrating the project\u2019s benefits effectively. Moreover, proactive tracking of status reports, risk registers, steering meetings, etc., are crucial to zero in on areas that need fixing and control measures before it gets late.<\/p>\n The above-mentioned practices can come in handy when dealing with stakeholders and help you win more projects.<\/p>\n Stakeholders hold a key position in defining and shaping the success of a project. Hence, it is highly important to identify them, understand their expectations, and cater to them. Combining a positive attitude and some good practices as discussed above can help make project stakeholder management<\/strong> efficient and effortless.<\/p>\n So, how do you implement a stakeholder management plan in your organization?<\/em><\/p>\n SAVIOM is the market leader in helping multinational clients manage their resources efficiently and effectively. With over 20 years of experience, this Australian-based MNC has a global presence across 50 countries and has helped 100+ clients with their Workforce Planning Software<\/a>. Saviom also provides tools for Enterprise Project Resource Management<\/a>, Project Portfolio Management<\/a>, and Professional Service Automation<\/a>. Boost your remote team collaboration with Saviom.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Apart from the efforts of resources and project managers, the fate of the project lies in the hands of executives, upper management, clients, and sponsors. They have the authority to approve or reject any project, sponsor or decline to buy in, alter the requirements at any stage, and so on. In the project management realm, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":15898,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n
\n<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n![\"Maximize](\"http:\/\/ec2-52-95-249-27.ap-south-1.compute.amazonaws.com:8000\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/28_Who-are-Project-Stakeholders-and-How-to-Manage-Them-Efficiently.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nWho are stakeholders in a project?<\/h2>\n
\nOut of these, key stakeholders<\/strong> not only have a stake in the project but also have a major influence on it. They can even disrupt or bring the project to an abrupt halt if they withdraw their support.<\/p>\n![\"develop](\"http:\/\/ec2-52-95-249-27.ap-south-1.compute.amazonaws.com:8000\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/MicrosoftTeams-image-1-1.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nTypes of project stakeholders<\/h3>\n
Internal stakeholders<\/h3>\n
External stakeholders<\/h3>\n
How to identify stakeholders in a project?<\/h2>\n
\nAccording to it, there are four types of project stakeholders<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n
![\"influence\/interest](\"http:\/\/ec2-52-95-249-27.ap-south-1.compute.amazonaws.com:8000\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/MicrosoftTeams-image-2-1.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"PMO](\"http:\/\/ec2-52-95-249-27.ap-south-1.compute.amazonaws.com:8000\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/Ebook-The-PMO-Game-Changer2.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nWhy is project stakeholder management important?<\/h2>\n
7 Effective ways to manage project stakeholders<\/h2>\n
Involve stakeholders from initiation to closure<\/h3>\n
![\"requirement](\"http:\/\/ec2-52-95-249-27.ap-south-1.compute.amazonaws.com:8000\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/MicrosoftTeams-image-3-1.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nSeek agreement on milestones\/deliverables<\/h3>\n
Convey the updates about the project\u2019s progress<\/h3>\n
Be transparent about risks and challenges<\/h3>\n
![\"Risk](\"http:\/\/ec2-52-95-249-27.ap-south-1.compute.amazonaws.com:8000\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/MicrosoftTeams-image-4-1.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nCommunicate immediately when a risk turns into an issue<\/h3>\n
Prepare a robust change management framework<\/h3>\n
![\"improve](\"http:\/\/ec2-52-95-249-27.ap-south-1.compute.amazonaws.com:8000\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/How-can-you-improve-Organizational-1-1.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nManage and resolve stakeholders\u2019 skepticism effectively<\/h3>\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n
The Glossary<\/h2>\n
![\"Glossary\"](\"http:\/\/ec2-52-95-249-27.ap-south-1.compute.amazonaws.com:8000\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/MicrosoftTeams-image-5-1.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nThe SAVIOM Solution<\/h2>\n