How to build solid stakeholder engagement

Knowing your Stakeholders isn't just enough, here are the steps to manage and build trust and relationships

Before we get started, lets learn the basics

What is a Stakeholder?

"A stakeholder has a vested interest in a company and can either affect or be affected by a business operations and performance."

Depends on the business you manage, typically stakeholders are investors, employees, customers, suppliers, communities, governments, or trade associations.

What is Stakeholder management?

Stakeholder management is a critical component to the successful delivery of any project, programme or activity. A stakeholder is any individual, group or organization that can affect, be affected by, or perceive itself to be affected by a programme.

Stakeholder management comprises four steps:

1. Identify, recognize and acknowledge stakeholder;

2. Determine their influence and interest;

3. Establish communication management plan

4. Influencing and engaging stakeholder

Based on the PMI - Figure 13-1. Project stakeholder Management Overview

While you manage a business or a project, you need to involve or work with several stakeholders directly or indirectly

Some stakeholders may have complete control while others may have no or less control but still may put pressure on you and your projects delivery. Managing them is critical as they may create negative influence on your project leading to failure or repeat work

Here are tips to manage and build strong sustainable stakeholders relationship:

1. Prioritize and understand your stakeholders

   1. Know and identify all your stakeholders - Internal vs External

   2. Stakeholder Engagement Assessment matrix - this tool provides you the understanding of your stakeholders, roles they play and the power/interest they hold. Stakeholder analysis

2. Establish Objectives

   1. share your vision with your respective stakeholders,

   2. be open and honest with what you can achieve

   3. call out the challenges and plans to overcome them

3. Align your strategy

   1. share your project plans and how you are going to meet the set objectives

4. Executing your strategies

   1. share detailed plans on how you will execute the project towards completion and share the people who will work towards these activities be it the Team Leaders, SME's etc. this will build confidence to your stakeholders

5. Effective communication

   1. Set up clear governance model

   2. share the health and hygiene of your project based on the agreed timelines

   3. share newsletters or performance status reports based on the communication plan

6. Request feedback

   1. ask for suggestions to improve or seek advise - this will keep them highly engaged

Important tools:

Here are the different types of stakeholders you need to deal with and the engagement strategy

Below Stakeholder analysis helps to understand the stakeholder environment and how to prioritize them - Stakeholder management

Required SoftSkills - Leadership, Communication & Collaboration, Teamwork, Problem Solving, Flexible, ethical, problem solving, Motivational

To Conclude:

All stakeholders play an important role during the lifecycle of your project. Engaging and managing them appropriately is vital for your project success.

What challenges you had to go through during stakeholder engagement? please share your thoughts below

For SME's/team leaders aspiring to become PMP or a Project manager facing hurdles running your project, my recommendation is to study for PMP Certification this course provides you the foundation on

• People - soft skills required to run the projects smoothly

• Process - technical aspects

• Business environment - connection between projects and organizational strategy

personally, this course helped me to improve my operations and my understanding towards the above foundations better. PMP Examination Content Outline