Stakeholder Management Strategy

When a project is initiated without support of stakeholder the project won’t succeed. Stakeholders are the integral part of the project which may have a positive impact or negative impact on the project, that’s why we need a management strategy to ensure project success

First we need to understand who stakeholders are, a stakeholder can be individual, group of person or an organization that is affected or impacted by the project. Stakeholders have interest in your project. There are different kinds of stakeholders like project stakeholders, business stakeholders, and 3rd party and negative stakeholders.

As now we know who is stakeholder, we need to have a strategy to manage stakeholders as they are involved throughout the project. Stakeholder management involves identifying people or organization that may be affected. Project manager develops strategy and make sure all the expectations are met and delivered. The main purpose of the stakeholder management is to involve stakeholders throughout the project.

Stakeholder management

First we need to identify the potential stake holders and then classify and prioritize the stakeholders according to their role and interest.

Depending up on the influence, impact and interest the stakeholders need to be managed.

• Few stakeholders need to be engaged throughout the project and manage them closely.
• Then there would be a stakeholder who needs to be informed time to time.
• Few stakeholders need to be satisfied by providing them project details or the progress of the software
• And the stakeholders who need to be monitored.

We need to check the stakeholder involvement in the project

• Stakeholder who are unaware of the project or impact of the project
• Stake holder who is aware of impact but resistant to change.
• Stakeholder is neutral which is nothing but neither he is supportive nor has resistance
• Support stakeholder who support the changes in the project
• Stakeholder who is actively engaged and leading project.

Management of stakeholders would be easy if project manager has skills

• If there is continuous engagement of stakeholders and proper communication with stakeholders
• Building trust which can be done by building rapport, delivering at given commitments.
• While communicating there must be active listening to understand the issue and understand the point of stakeholders instead of thinking that they know all the answers.
• PM should know how to resolve conflicts and overcome resistance to change.