Project Stakeholder Management

Project stakeholder management focuses on the people, group, or organization that will have positive or negative effects from the project. The process also analyzes stakeholder expectations and their impact on the overall project. In order for the project stakeholder to get connected with the overall project, project stakeholder management creates appropriate management strategies for an engagement stakeholder experience. This will allow for better project decisions with proper execution. Stakeholders’ expectations must be analyzed by the project team and also must examine the impact of the project.

For a successful project stakeholder management, different processes get involved to make the management work. The work of identifying stakeholders, plan stakeholder engagement, manage stakeholder engagement, monitor stakeholder engagement provides project stakeholder management the gear it needs to perform well. Each one of the processes helps the stakeholder management give direction to all of its processes. In practice, these processes overlap and interact in ways that can not be explained well. All the project stakeholder management processes have discrete processes with their defined interfaces,

Key Concepts for Project stakeholder management #

The stakeholder will get impacted by the project and will have an impact on the object in a negative or positive way. The key to influence will vary on stakeholders; some stakeholders will have a large amount of influence over the project while some less. It is very much important for the stakeholder to engage, prioritize, and identify the approach to the project. It is the role of project manners to identify a way to engage all stakeholders in an appropriate way. When the project charter has been approved, the process of stakeholder identification and engagement should commence at the initial stage. The faster the stakeholder identification and engagement can begin, the better the project outcome will be at the end.

The project objective should be about the expectation raised by the stakeholders. Continuous communication will be very helpful to all stakeholders, including team members, and understand their needs and expectations, manage conflicting interests, and better engage in project decisions and activities.

Trends and Emerging Practices in Project stakeholder engagement #

The trends and emerging prices for project stakeholder management include:

• Identification of all stakeholders and not limited the search to only a few members.
• Ensure the involvement of all team members to carry out stakeholder engagement activities.
• Reviewing the stakeholder community on a regular basis.
• Communicating and consulting with the stakeholders that have been affected by the work or outcome of the project. This gets done through the concept of co-creation. Which is a process that places greater emphasis or priority on the affected stakeholders in the team.
• And finally, capturing the values of effective stakeholder holder engagement through positive and negative. Higher levels of active support from stakeholders will be seen as a positive value. Loss of reputation and neglecting stakeholders to the project will be seen as a negative value.

These are the trends and policies that get implemented in project stakeholder management. All of them ensure the involvement of all the stakeholders. Their involvement will make the work better and help the project team focus on the work that takes higher priority over the lower ones. This is how the project stakeholder management uses the new practices to better its core functionality.

Identify stakeholder #

Stakeholders will play a key role in the project management, they need to get identified and analyzed regularly. A documentation process must be kept that includes information regarding the stakeholder’s interest, involvement, interdependencies, influence, and potential impact on the entire project’s success. Each stakeholder’s involvement is valuable for the success of the project, so the process of identifying stakeholders helps the project team to identify and put appropriate priority for each stakeholder engagement.

Identifying stakeholders takes place at earlier stages of the project or at the same time as the development of the project charter. The process of identifying stakeholders may get reported only if it is necessary. But it is highly recommended for this process to take place only at the start of each phase. This is when significant changes occur in the project or the organization.

Tools and Techniques used in Identify Stakeholders #

Expert Judgement #

Having a group of experts will help solve the problem with proper accuracy. As the rise of technology takes over all aspects of life. Project managers will also have to adapt to the changes for better core functionality and effective management makings. Implementation of new ideas and practices will also open the project to new challenges. These challenges can only be tackled by experience and having knowledge about the poem. Understanding the politics and power structure of the organization, knowledge of the environment, the culture of the organization, and the proper relationship between all the team members. These are some of the ways expert judgment can help with identifying stakeholders.

Data Gathering #

Feedback is important for the success of any product or service. The data-gathering process will help the project to run more efficiently and will have a positive impact on all future projects that share some similarities with the current project. This process gets done through questionnaires and surveys and brainstorming. Questions or surveys get done with one on one reviews, focus group sessions, and other valuable techniques.

While on the other hand, Brainstorming focuses on gathering data from groups such as team members or experts and face to face with groups. They also use the virtual environment technology to extend the communication with members even further than physical confinement.

Data Analysis #

Each stakeholder will have relevant information such as position, roles, expectations, attitudes, and their interest in information about the project. All of them will have their own way of thinking and requirements that should be met on a regular basis. Availability of project documentation and lessons from previous projects will help identify stakeholders and other supporting information.

Data Representation #

Having a clear view of data will reveal most of the information on the surface. Data needs to be represented with processes using various methods. Each stakeholder will have their level of authority over the project, level of concern, and ability to influence the outcome of the project. Techniques such as power or interest grid, power or influence grid, or impact grid will help the grouping of stakeholders to their level. These models are very useful when it comes to small projects or a project that shares a simple relationship between stakeholders and the project.

Different Model of Data Representation #

• Stakeholder cube is another variation of data representation when it uses a grid model system. But instead of using the grid model as a whole, it combines grid elements into a three-dimensional model. Implementation of a three-dimensional model improves the depiction of the stakeholder community and the creation of communication strategies.

• The salience model goes in-depth into the stakeholder-based on their assessments of their power to influence the outcome of the project, urgency, and legitimacy. The salience model applies to the team and measures their level of involvement with work on the project. This model is useful for large complex stakeholder communities. These are the places where complex networks of relationships will be very commonplace.

• The other two data presentation models are the direction of inline and prioritization. The direction of influence classifies stakeholders according to their influence over the project and the team behind the project. They are classified by upward, downward, outward, and sideward. If the project has a large number of stakeholders, then the implementation of prioritization will get a plate to represent data.

Plan Stakeholder Engagement #

This process creates approaches to involve stakeholders based on their needs, expectations, interest, and potential impact on the project. This process creates a well-managed actionable plan that helps with interactions amongst all stakeholders related to the project. An effective plan recognizes the information needs of the stakeholders and constantly updates the information as changes in the stakeholder community happen.

Once the stakeholder community has been identified, the first version of the project stakeholder engagement plan should get developed. The update should be a constant element of the management plan. So the new information will reflect on the changes to the stakeholder community.

Tools and Techniques used in plan stakeholder management #

To create a plan for stakeholder management it goes through several tools and techniques to make every little process within the plan stakeholder management possible. All the tools and techniques are very similar to other processes included in the project stakeholder management.

Expert Judgement #

Expertise gets considered by individuals and groups to handle the challenges and solutions better for the plan stakeholder management. The initial plan will be carried out throughout the project. So it needs to have in-depth research on the predicted environments for the project. Different techniques will be used to make the plan more effective. One of the curricula elements that will play a huge role in creating an effective plan is the inclusion of expert judgment. The structure of the plan is very much dependent on the handling by the groups of individuals who have specialized knowledge on this topic.

Data Gathering and Analysis

The data-gathering process helps the project team to have more information to work with. That will make the accuracy of the plan much more precise with facts and information instead of basing everything on the prediction. Data analysis follows assumption and constraints analysis and root cause analysis.

Decision making #

Challenging problems will require the implementation of proper slain in the nick of time without making any delay. Proper decision-making requests to the people who have specialized knowledge in the challenges that will be part of the object management. Nearly all new or old working techniques will be riddled with problems, some are common and others will be significant. Three challenges must be met with a proper solution to stop the spread of the problem at the right time.

Meetings #

Meetings will take place between stakeholders to create and analyze the data required for the stakeholder engagement planning process. The plan needs input from different stakeholders and their ideas on the project. The meeting will make things much more clear as all stakeholders will have their say on the plan and the process behind the plan. Meeting also maintains communication between stakeholders, now it is done through various new technologies that make things much easier than they used to be. The implementation of virtual communication has made things much easier, as new technology such as video conference calls allows people to join remotely without the need of physical presence.

Manage stakeholder engagement #

Manage stakeholder engagement builds communication between stakeholders to meet their expectations and needs, address issues, and foster appropriate stakeholder involvement in the project. The existence of this process allows the project magner to minimize the resistance from the stakeholder while simultaneously increasing the support from the project manager. This process also gets performed throughout the project, almost every aspect of the process is improved for the running of project stakeholder management.

The activities involved in the process such as:

• Engaging stakeholders to maintain the commitment to the success of the project.
• Managing stakeholder expectations through proper negotiation and communication
• Addressing any risks or potential concerns related to stakeholder management.
• Anticipating any issue that may be raised by stakeholders
• Resolving issues that need to be identified or need to be clarified.

Managing stakeholders helps the stakeholder to get a clear understanding of the project. That includes every aspect of the project such as goals, objectives, benefits, and risks for the project. That will affect their contribution to the success of the project.

Communication skills #

Project management uses feedback to better understand the needs of stakeholders and their reactions to the various project management activities and key decisions. Feedback may get collected through conversation, issue identification, meeting, progress reporting, and survey.s the input from the stakeholder is important to make the project process meet their needs above anything else. This is one of the best ways to get a proper idea on what stakeholder desires for the project.

Various communication methods help get the information out of the stakeholder to the project management so the team behind the project will get to work on what they got from the stakeholder’s feedback. Communication tools play a major role in shifting the direction from randomness to precision planning and meeting the requirements of these stakeholders.

Interpersonal and team skills #

Team skills such as cultural awareness, conflict management, negotiations, observations, political awareness will help deal with the team much better. This kind of process allows for the team to discuss the subject in a friendlier manner where every member will have their voices heard. This allows for a friendlier communicable climate that will make things much more efficient.

Project management plan updates #

The change request process will carry out any changes that might happen to the project management plan. New information will make things more dramatic and efficient for the project running time. Changes may happen to the communication management plan or stakeholder engagement plan. Along with the changes to the management plan, it can also happen to the project documents. Here the changes may or may not happen to the changelog, issue log, lesson learned register, stakeholder register.

Monitor Stakeholder Engagement #

When the planning section is completed, the next thing comes down to the monitoring process. This process allows for monitoring project stakeholder relationships, engine stakeholder through modification of strategies or plans. Monitoring allows for increased efficiency and effectiveness of stakeholder engagement activities as the project goes through various changes.

It depends on:

• Data Analysis

It uses alternative analysis, root cause analysis, stakeholder analysis to determine evaluation options, basic underlying reasons, and helps determine the position of stakeholder groups.

• Decision making

Decision-making comes down to multi-criteria decision analysis and voting. This allows for proper engagement and resources from stakeholders.

• Communication skills

Inclusion of feedback and presentation makes things much more clear. As clear information will be very helpful in laying out complicated information to the stakeholder without being overwhelming.

• Work performance information

Includes information such as status of stakeholder engagement and destined level of engagement as refined in stakeholder engagement assessment matrix, stakeholder cube, and other tools.

• Project management/ document updates

The change process will get used to carrying out any update that happens through the project or document. Updates will happen to the resource management plan, communication management plan, and stakeholder engagement plan. On the document side, the changes will take place to the issue log, lesson learned register, risk register, and stakeholder register.

Conclusion #

Maintaining the management of stakeholders is a crucial ingredient for the success of the project. The initial plan must be met through proper guidance and information. Informing stakeholders through various stages of the project and updating the information will allow the stakeholder to engage with the project properly. The existence of project stakeholder engagement helps with maintaining the relationship endangerment of the project stakeholders. All the additional process helps the stakeholder management to carry out its functions properly, so the end goal will get achieved much faster without going through rough issues or challenges.