Managed successfully or to failure, all projects ultimately have consequences – not just on the resources you are using, but on the people who feel the effects of the project. These people have expectations, realistic or maddening. These people deal with the project you’ve left behind long after you’ve transitioned any sort of needed handover and moved on. For every edifice with a plaque commemorating the project that built it, the architect is cited with regard; that architect, however, completed that project for the benefit of every person who ever walks past that plaque every single day, be they workers or customers.
You know these people as the project’s stakeholders, those crucial influencers that have varying amounts of courses on their plates, but all of whom feel the burden of that edifice as it pertains to their everyday lives. And to know the ins and outs of stakeholder management for your project managing ways, you’ll need to know a few things:
- Who they consist of
- Whether they change during the project’s timeline
- Does their status ever need amendment?
What constitutes your stakeholders?
There are a variety of people that can be labelled as a potential stakeholder in your project, and the list is not confined to mere individuals: groups and clusters can feel the heat of your project management fire, both internally and externally. If communications makes up more than three-quarters of project management, much of that communication falls in the department of the personalities you’ll have to massage in your stakeholder engagements.
“A lot of effort often goes into the management of stakeholder communications,” says Anne Dagen, a Senior Programme and Project Manager commenting on a LinkedIn discussion post hosted by the Arras People Group Page. “It’s much more difficult to manage stakeholder expectations, especially as these may be driven by factors outside the project and by people outside the project’s stakeholder population.
“Expectation management requires substantial networking effort to enable the project manager to keep abreast of whom and what is likely to influence the perceived success of a project.”
Broken down further, who could be your internal and external stakeholders? A hypothetical list might include these personnel…
If you want to learn more about stakeholder management, check out the original article from the July 2011 edition of Project Management Tipoffs, the project management & recruitment newsletter from Arras People. Subscribe to Tipoffs to receive next month’s edition free. We’ll re-send the July newsletter to those who get in touch this week.
