Stakeholders are your friends, really

Why is it that stakeholders seem to come out of the woodwork as soon as your project either gets really successful or runs into some hard challenges? Well, I really believe it’s because they care.

At the beginning of your project you go through the process of developing your list of stakeholders, some of us even go to the next step and analyse the strategy for managing stakeholders. What doesn’t always happen is a refresh of the stakeholder list and plan as things change in a project.  So, no wonder you suddenly feel like stakeholders are popping up every time you turn around as soon as something changes.

I can think of a lot of examples where this has happened to me.  Any number of projects looked like they had little or no impact on the Marketing team, for example, until the scope changed to include not only regular customer updates, but also a special communication about a new project deliverable. The Marketing team did a great job but I needed to make sure they didn’t feel ambushed with the change. I’ve had the Technology team suddenly get excited about changes to the infrastructure or architecture areas long before the sponsor signed off on a scope change.  I’m sure you can come up with your own examples of stakeholder triggers beyond scope change and rumour mill.

Putting aside the fact that some stakeholders don’t pay attention until the project has a real impact on them; I call it organizational denial when people don’t recognize how interrelated everything is in a company. Here are some tips to minimize the surprise.

Set up a meeting with your team leads and specifically review the stakeholder management plan, just the same way you do with the risk management plan. You do review the risk management plan don’t you?

When there is potential for a change in stakeholders, set up a meeting with the person who leads that team. This can be a new stakeholder or an existing one where the impact has changed substantially.  Remember the new stakeholder will need to be brought up to date from the beginning of the project – don’t assume everyone knows what your project is about. I’ve had major cross-divisional projects that people were not aware of when I met with them.

Don’t assume you’ve always identified the stakeholders by going through a scope statement. Use your organizational knowledge to think about the people who might make themselves stakeholders. There are always people in the organization who don’t agree with the use of resources for your project; sometimes they have a project they think takes precedent and sometimes it’s a principle thing. Think about who might be threatened by the success of your project – is there any area that might lose staffing levels. Is there someone who’s pet project was declined, will they start putting up obstacles for you?

The important skill to remember with these stakeholders is you have one mouth and two ears. These people are usually not out to get you, they have something important to contribute. If you listen and clarify any misunderstanding, you might gain an ally from a potential blocker.

Here are a few links that might be interesting:

Mind tools – an article on stakeholder management and a tool to use – a good community to join

Project Smart – a UK site with great information on stakeholder management

Wikipedia – definition

Max Wideman pm guru, it’s not the prettiest site but it’s practical