As some of you may be wondering, what exactly is a stakeholder? A stakeholder is essentially an independent party, group, person or organisation that has an interest or concern in your organisation. Not all stakeholders are equal, as will be explained later on in this article, but they all contribute to the resources from which your organisation draws from.
Stakeholder engagement is essentially the process of communicating with, interacting with and influencing the project stakeholders to the overall good of the project as a whole. Stakeholder engagement is particularly important to a project as its completion often depends on how stakeholders see the project. From this alone, it’s easy to see why it is such a vital part of project management.
Sinnaps, project management software, and tools like it are excellent for presenting and managing information related to a project and everything going on within it, such as the progress of each and every aspect of the project, deadlines, contributions made by each individual worker and so on. Being able to clearly represent your data and information so that it can be understood by multiple parties will provide an effective way to communicate the state of the project to the stakeholders.
Stakeholder engagement examples would include communicating with them via focus groups, questionnaires, interviews, and e-mail messaging.
Depending on the way the project is viewed by the stakeholders, the project can be considered successful and having achieved the important outcomes. The project needs to be made with their viewpoints, expectations, concerns and requirements in mind and must meet each of these in order to be considered successful. Stakeholder meetings will often involve ensuring that the project meets their personal criteria.
An effective stakeholder engagement model would consider the following on how to engage different example of stakeholders:
- Partnership
- Participation
- Consultation
- Push Communications
- Pull Communications
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Project Management Communication Plan
Índice
What is a Stakeholder Engagement Plan and Strategy
Stakeholder engagement benefits immensely from a well thought-out plan and strategy, and it can be considered an example of stakeholders engagement best practice. An effective stakeholder engagement framework can do a lot for communication and presentation with stakeholders.
A good stakeholder plan and strategy would at the very least, involve the following:
- The best approaches to involve stakeholders in any position
- Ways to reach the expectations and requirements of a stakeholder
- The most effective ways for communicating with stakeholders
- The ways the negative impact of stakeholders can be mitigated or eliminated
- Methods for creating buy-in and ownership
These would all be important for an effective stakeholder plan and strategy. Sinnaps can help to organise the information and guidelines, alongside distribute it with the necessary people, this will allow you to easily craft and distribute an effective Stakeholder Plan and Strategy.
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What is a Stakeholder Communication Plan?
A stakeholder communication plan would be a component of stakeholder engagement and management. Ensuring that the key stakeholders are kept in the loop, as the appropriate level of detail and at the appropriate stages is important and makes up the basic idea behind an effective stakeholder communication plan.
After figuring out and identifying the right stakeholders, it is important to devise an optimal stakeholder communication plan for how you can best manage them. One way to manage this is through Sinnaps, utilising its range of features to display the stakeholders in question and note the important milestones, progression or developments that they would be particularly interested in as well as how they would relate to the financial and emotion concerns the stakeholder has with the project.
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Lesson 4: The milestones, ‘to be or not to be’ and shall we continue with the project?
The project manager would likely be the one to create and maintain this plan. However, they may often times share the plan with the rest of the project team, particularly who is responsible for engaging the stakeholders. In some cases, other individuals may have access to the plan, but typically it is not shared with stakeholders that are listed within the plan itself.
Besides, stakeholder mapping enables business managers to have a visual representation of the various stakeholders of their organizations.
How to deal with Stakeholder Relations and Conflicts
Stakeholder relations and conflicts are an important aspect of stakeholder engagement and management as without proper approach you can potentially harm the relationship with a stakeholder which can create serious problems in relative to the completion and progression of the project in question.
There are many levels of stakeholder engagement, and at each level a degree of effective communication strategy is involved. This means that being able to deal with stakeholder relations and conflicts well will positively affect your relationship with them in multiple ways.
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Lesson 5 – Communication: How to get the team moving at cruising speed
Environmental stakeholders are one type of stakeholder with whom it is important to maintain positive relationships with, as they are concerned with the organisation in relative to how it affects the environment; having a negative effect on the environment can cause problems with this type of stakeholder.
An approach that carries out the following stakeholder engagement techniques is preferable for dealing with and preventing conflict with stakeholders:
- Identify sources of potential and actual conflict
- Develop conflict resolution strategies and techniques
- Apply conflict resolution strategies and techniques
- Control and review the effectiveness of the conflict resolution strategy/technique being applied
The aspects related to stakeholder engagement listed in this article should assist any organisation in their relationships with stakeholders, there are many stakeholder engagement tools, like Sinnaps, and methods mentioned here, each of which are the ways of good stakeholder communication.
