How to Control Stakeholder Management Effectively?

What or Who Is a Stakeholder?

Let’s start by defining what a stakeholder is.

The Project Management Institute’s A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) describes a stakeholder as a person or organization that:

• Is actively and effectively involved in the project

•  Has interests that may be positively or negatively affected by the performance or completion of the project
• May exert influence over the project, its deliverables or its project team members

Categorization of the Stakeholders

Categorize your stakeholder as per their work or responsibility such as the customer, the project team, suppliers and vendors, program managers, functional managers, etc and based on their role and responsibilities document your database – how you will be managing any particular stakeholder for your project? Doing this you can judge who is your main stakeholders based on their influence in the projects. Prioritize the list of the stakeholders based on their influence. It will help you a lot. Try it!

How to Resolve Conflicts Between Stakeholders?

This is a big issue. When you are running a project, you will be facing these issues. The biggest issue that is all too common is the lack of a defined process for resolving conflict amongst stakeholders. A stakeholder influence diagram is often used to prioritize stakeholders; however, less influential stakeholders can have ideas that are discounted. Balancing the influence on decision-making to add benefit to the project is vital to success.

Prepare a Stakeholder Management Plan

It is always wise to prepare a stakeholder management plan in advance. It can be useful to create this type of plan, as long as it is then used by your team. Creating a stakeholder management plan just to get the project success is always a plus for any project management.

Best Actions to Influence Your Stakeholders

Using a few simple techniques and approaches to get your stakeholders on board will go a long way toward helping your initiative to succeed. In particular as a project manager you should take care of the following activities:

• Begin your process of identifying the stakeholders as early as possible. Try to not leave the same until you start the execution stage of the project.
• Be very clear with your communications.
• Be open and honest with all the related people in your project.
• Gain feedback and take it into account – Share the same to the concerned stakeholders.

Impact of the Stakeholders on the Projects

It can be very costly if you ignore any of the stakeholder’s expectations and it can hugely impact the project negatively like delay in deliveries. Suppose you need the resources for running the project as planned and if you have managed the expectations of HR manager positively then you will surely get a soft support from your HR manager because you’ve managed his/her expectations at the initial stage and the result can be vice-versa in case you have not managed his/her expectations initially.

Furthermore, a project manager must manage the influence of all the stakeholders in relation to project requirements to ensure a required output. The project manager should take care of the interests of the stakeholders balancing the requirements of the project.

You can check out Simplilearn’s PMP Certification Training Course to get an in-depth insight of the project management processes, project management framework and prepare yourself for the role of a project manager by placing greater emphasis on strategic and business knowledge.