Stakeholder Management

Who is stakeholder?

When a project or software is being implemented there are people within the organization or entities that get affected by this new project or software are called as Stakeholders of the project. In other terms the Stakeholders have direct influence on the project.

A stakeholder for your project is anyone who has an interest in the project.

Why is stakeholder management necessary?

Stakeholder management involves considering the different interests and values stakeholders have and taking necessary steps during the course of execution of the project to ensure that these are taken care of.

HAPPY STAKEHOLDER = SUCCESSFUL PROJECT

Stakeholder management also helps in identifying existing relationships with the stakeholders. This would need to be converted into partnerships and lead to building trust and enhance collaboration among stakeholders.
How does Stakeholder management work?

Stakeholder management mainly works through a strategy which would deal with managing different aspects of Stakeholder expectations. These are important steps or processes that needs to be followed for a better stakeholder management:

Stakeholder Identification: This is the first and most important step. It is very necessary to identify the entire stakeholder either internal or external. The best way to do this is to maintain a stakeholder map listing out all the relevant stakeholders.

Stakeholder Analysis: Once the stakeholders are identified, the project manager should proceed to analyze each of stakeholders to find out the needs, priorities, expectations and common relationships.

Stakeholder Matrix: It is necessary to create the matrix of the identified stakeholders to categorize each of them based on their influence on the project.

Stakeholder Engagement: This is one of the important phases where in each of the stakeholders starts engaging with the project manager which will facilitate better understanding and will help building a professional relationship and ease execution.

Stakeholder Agreements: This process would help all the stakeholders to be on the same page w.r.t the project requirements and needs. The stakeholders would sign an agreement which is collection of all agreed decisions

The Stakeholders can also be effectively managed by employing the Responsible-Accountable-Consulted-Informed analysis, most famously called as RACI chart or matrix.
Typical Stakeholders
These are some of the typical stakeholders that we would encounter in most of the projects.
• Project Sponsor: Generally a Senior Manager would be the sponsor for the project.
• Other teams within the organization: These teams might provide the resources, skills and expertise to execute the project. They may also be waiting the outcome of the project which might feed into their own projects.
• Customers: These are the ones for whom the project is executed for. These are the direct beneficiaries of the project outcome.
• Suppliers: These are the ones who would provide services or products.
• Project Team: These are team members who are responsible for executing the project who would also are important stakeholders. It’s very important to consider the Project Team’s interests.

Stakeholder Management

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