Stakeholders Management

Stakeholders management is a process of identifying, analyzing, planning and implementation of required or desired process which might have a direct or indirect impact on the business. Stake holders might be individuals or a group who are interested in the business, who are involved in the work or effected by the outcome of the work.

If we consider a project, the stake holder management involves the following.

• Identification of the stakeholders
• Analysis of their expectations and influences in the project
• Developing appropriate strategies to work with stakeholders
• Executing the developed process

The crucial part of the stakeholder management is managing conflicting interests and engaging stake holder in key decision-making activities.

It is important to understand the values and issues the stakeholders have so you can address them and keep everyone on board for the duration of the project. With this the Stakeholders management is as important as finishing a project. We come across may examples which say that the reality of ignoring or neglecting, the root of the problem. One such example is

In January 1996, the Gartner Group, in their paper project Management Skills: Avoiding Management by crisis, identified insufficient involvement of stakeholders and infrequent communication with sponsors as leading cause of project failure.

Stakeholders Management can be successful if the following are incorporated or followed during the project. They are as follows:

• Setting Goals and Objectives
• Agreeing Deliverables
• Communicating Information

Setting Goals & Objectives:

Engaging Stakeholders while creating goals & objectives at the early sage of project will help the project to deliver in successful. If we engage them actively they find it easy and aim at improving the performance

Agreeing Deliverables:

Agreeing deliverables in the sense that the stakeholder is clearly communicated of the goals and objectives that needs to be achieved and efforts made to ensure that there is clear understanding of quality of each deliverable.

Communicating Information:

Once the project is commenced then we need to communicate to both project team and stakeholders. It is said that we need to communicate each point to our stakeholder. So, the most common way of communicating the stakeholder is regular status reports. Daily update to the stakeholder will let him know about the status of the project and the quantity of quality work performed by tech team.

It is right to say that, always be close to your stake holder, they are the most important people on your project. One of the underlying lesser known advantages of stakeholder engagement is that it uncovers risks that are over looked by project members