Stakeholder Management Strategy

Why Stakeholder Management Strategy?

In order to effectively manage stakeholders, one should acquire the skill of stakeholder management strategy. The stakeholder management strategy identifies the different stakeholder and approach that to be followed to gain increase in support and negative impact of stakeholders and approach that to be followed to gain increase in support and negative impact of stakeholder throughout the life cycle of the project. Effectively managing stakeholder is key component of successful project management and should never be ignored. Proper stakeholder management can be used to gain support for project and anticipate resistance, conflict or competing objectives among the project’s stakeholder. By initiating early and frequent communication and stakeholder management, we can more effectively manage and balance these interests while accomplishing all project tasks.

Identify Stakeholders:

The important section of stakeholder management strategy is to identify the stakeholders. It is imperative that all stakeholders are identified regardless of how major or minor they are. This is to be done to categorize the stakeholders under different areas which helps to analyze the approach to be followed to seek their support during project life cycle. If any stakeholder is ignored, there may be chances that they may create delays or obstacles to the project at some time of project life cycle. Usually Brainstorming session will be conducted to identify different stakeholders of project. Brain storming session includes project team and project sponsor.

Key Stakeholders:

Each stakeholder has different requirements. It is different to develop strategy for each strategy. There fore we will group them based on the parameters like Power, Interest, Impact, Influence. After classification, it would be easy for us to identify key stakeholders and focus on important stakeholders and avoid less influential ones.

Management strategy:

Though there are many models available, Power-Interest model is most well-known strategy.

In this model, you can divide stakeholders into four categories:

1. High-power – high-interest
2. High-power – low-interest
3. Low-power – high-interest
4. Low-power – low-interest

We draw chart for depicting the above sections

You will use the following strategies to manage stakeholders:

• The high-power and high-interest group should be managed with the utmost care.
• High-power and low-interest stakeholders should be kept satisfied.
• The low-power and high-interest stakeholders should be kept informed.
• The low-power and low-interest groups require the least effort. They should only be monitored.

Keep monitoring your stakeholders for any status change. You never know when a low-power stakeholder will become high-power and influential. Likewise, a powerful stakeholder may become less so in a later stage of the project.