Stakeholder Management
Running a successful project requires a high degree of stakeholder management. So who are stakeholders? A stakeholder is anyone who has an interest in your project or will be affected by its deliverables or output. It is important to understand the values and issues that stakeholders have in order to address them and keep everyone on board for the duration of the project.
In January 1996 the Gartner Group, in their paper Project Management Skills: Avoiding Management by Crisis, identified insufficient involvement of stakeholders and infrequent communication with sponsors as leading causes of project failure. Here are a few ideas and a plan template that can help.
Setting Goals and Objectives
Involve stakeholders in creating a set of realistic goals and objectives. Stakeholders are not always keen to participate but engaging them at this early stage of the project will help ensure success. Stakeholders are most likely to be actively engaged by a set of goals and objectives aimed at improving business performance and thereby take an interest in the project.
Agreeing Deliverables
All projects need a clear set of deliverables aimed at achieving the project goals and objectives. These should be communicated clearly to the stakeholders and efforts made to ensure that there is a clear understanding regarding the quality and composition of each deliverable. In order to achieve this, prototypes and samples can be prepared to avoid misunderstandings or disappointment later.
Communicating Information
Once your project is running there are two groups of people who need to be kept informed of progress, the project team and the stakeholders. The most effective way of communicating progress is via regular progress reports. The reports form a useful record of the project and can be e-mailed to all relevant parties and/or placed in a central repository that everyone has access to.
