Gokhan Gureser
PMP, LSS MBB, ASQ CSSBB
Continuous Improvement Expert
Stakeholders Management
Have you ever had difficulty in managing or convincing a stakeholder? ​
Have you ever had difficulty engaging stakeholders on your project? What about process experts and organization guru's?
You are not alone, all project managers have same experience on that.
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Stakeholders management is very key in project management not only in theory but in reality also.
Stakeholder literraly menas shareholder, in project management terminology it is the ones who influences or influenced by the project. Therefore, you customers, inner customers as well, team members, functional managers, sponsor, yourself as PM etc.
I will give you the formula of managing stakeholders. Follow these basic steps.
Determine Stakeholders
In a six-sigma project identify stakeholders at define phase after you get the project charter prepared. Determine all the stakeholders remember stakeholder means all who influence and is influenced by the project. If you are new in the organization, you may ask help from sponsor and team members.
Learn their expectations and requierements
Each stakeholder will have her/his own priorities and expectations.
Functional manager's concern might be resources and financial manager's priority most probably will be the budget. Use old projects' documents to facilitate to create the list of requierements and expectations.
Do not forget to convert expectations into explicit and measurable form as clear as possible.
Determine the engagement, authority, influence, expertise and interest level
Do not be shy to do that. keeping somehow confidential, the best experienced way to manage stakeholder is to write down.
Create a list of stakeholders, write their names, and their expectations next, and then engagemenet level, influence or charisma in the organization, expertise in the area and interest and motivation level.
If you will disclose this table try to use verbal and positive classification like helpful, encouraging, understanding, supportive, very supportive. This data need to be decoded using a private dictionary like helpful means least supportive or resistant and encouraging means supportive but not a lot.
If you will keep that table as a secret with your sponsor, you can use more realistic terms like unsopportive, resistent etc.
Influence is the other factor in stakeholder management. It actually means the authority or charisma in the organization. Be careful with the ones having high influence in the organization. They may affect your project both ways no matter how moany times they appear in project meetings.
Determine Expertise of project stakeholders. some stakeholders are stakeholders just because of their expertise. some of them has got some expertise but more experienced in managing at organization. Try to engage subject matter experts on their areas by creating them best conditions and time.
Determine interest level. It is difficult to determine, to be honest. You might ask to your sponsor for help.
Use your human skills to manage and improve relationship
Considerable part of stakeholder management is regarding communication and realtionship as we are all people who has got values, feelings.
You are not obliged to be loved by them, but trusted by them. To boost level of engagement build up rapport, trust, sincerity an sympathy with stakeholders. You will need to share time with them to do that.
Show your interest in meeting and sharing time with them and they will know that they are important and concerned and encouraged to meet with you frequently. Do not be shy you might declare that you are happy to meet with them and honored to work with an expert at his calibre.
Meet with key stakeholders and encourage them to give new insights and vision to the project. In the course of these meetings you will feel developed as a professional and you will create many new ideas and gaps in the organization that may lead to further projects. Moreover, you will improve sincerity and get accustomed to important figures of the organization. Do not forget your objective in these communications, it is to shift unaware and resistent stakeholders to be supportive at least neutral state and to keep motivated the supporters.
Be honest with your stakeholders, I mean ALWAYS.
Be honest and open. It looks easy to say. Sometimes, especially when you feel guilty regarding a schedule delay or bad CPI performance, it can be difficult to disclose the truth and tell all the story. Be honest. Do not worry, it is a value that exalts and glorify us also motivates not to make same or similar mistakes in the future. Most important outcome of being honest, open and sincere is to build trust on you.
Put yourself in the shoes of a stakeholder or a senior manager, CEO for one moment. Would you wish to work with the trusted one or the perfect one - means the one hiding all shortages?
Update your documents
As you communicate and improve relationship you can update your documents that plans your communication with your stakeholders. These tools change depending on organization and personal preferences. Some of them are power interest matrix, salience matrixes, or stakeholder register. Most PM prefer not to document but just to keep in their minds because of confidential information on that. You might want to undisclose the resistors and supporters, anyways to document with some implications is the best way, to be both transparent, communicative and feel control over project.
How to manage difficult stakeholders?
Hey, nobody wakes up and say : " Today I will be very difficult stakeholder for this project!"
Get the root causes of the resistence.
Be informed about his management style and personality.
Get his requierements and ideas with patience.
build rapport and trust with him.
Of course, you may not have very much time to manage all stakeholders that close. That's why prioritizing stakeholders has importance. I work still on a table that summarizes and captures all stakeholder communication will be published soon.
Have you ever had a stakeholder, he is high knowledgeable expert and showing resistence to project deliverables or disagreeing with scope?
If you had, you are not alone. I will give the ways to engage stakeholders on a structured form. For that , I need time guys. I will prepare soon a matrix for you, which will help you a lot to figure out how to approach to each kind of stakeholders. This will supply a conceptual way to manage your stakeholders efficiently.