Exploring trends and developments
in project management today.
What is 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.
Related Articles
Project Management: Stakeholder Risk Management
Is it really true that on time, on budget, and fulfilling all requirements means project success? Whose requirements are we really trying to meet anyway? And who decides if the original due date can be changed when the scope grows? In this article we'll address the people swirling around your project, stakeholders. You'll find some useful tips and other resources for optimising stakeholder involvement in your project.
Persuasion and Perception
Every year, between forty and seventy percent of all corporations and public sector bodies attempt to make strategic change. Overwhelmingly, formal projects are the preferred structure used to organise such effort, regardless of whether the underlying goals are defined in terms of business process re-engineering (BPR), technology upgrades, mergers and acquisitions, due diligence or similar concepts.
Avoiding the "Dark Twisty Turn-filled Tunnel Syndrome"
Many a well conceived project ends up in the scrap heap because of inadequate expectation setting, or sponsors and key stakeholders that become disinterested or impatient with projects that don't produce deliverables quickly enough. These projects, after creating an initial buzz, appear to enter "a dark twisty tunnel" where the light from the tunnel entrance is no longer seen, the tunnel exit is nowhere in sight, and inadequate milestones exist to indicate forward progress. Avoiding this trap is no trivial matter, as it is more than just defining milestones for your project.
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Think of stakeholders as anyone that can help or harm your project.
William R. Duncan, Project Management Partners
Primary author of the original version of “A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge”
Board Chair, PMCert, the independent certification body of asapm