Who Are The Project Stakeholders?
I was recently asked this question and I always consider this a great topic for discussion. Project stakeholders are the key to your success! A project stakeholder is defined as anyone who may be impacted by the project. Stakeholders can be individuals, teams, companies, organizations, or communities.
Successful projects ensure that the project stakeholders are successful as well. By engaging the stakeholder community early, the project team will have a better understanding of how the project may potentially impact those stakeholders. Projects can solve problems or leverage opportunities - either way, we could be introducing changes to the stakeholder community with respect to their work, their roles, their teams, their companies or communities. Here are a couple of examples:
If your organization uses a particular software program and there is an updated version that needs to be installed, that’s a project. Anyone using that software in the organization may be impacted by the changes in the updated version. New features or functionality may be part of the updated version. New protocols could be introduced for using the updated software or there could be a different way to access the software now that the upgrade has been delivered.
Your company may have made the decision to move the office location to another building across town. Anyone who works in the office location today, will be impacted by the move to a new building. Changes could include a different driving route to the new building, new public transit routes or carpool configurations, new parking requirements, access codes and badges as well as potentially changing your work hours or commuting time. Not to mention packing up your office for the move, finding your new office and getting settled into your new office.
Identifying the stakeholders of a project is a key step in the initiation phase of a project effort. After we have identified the potential stakeholders, we will begin to craft the stakeholder management plan. The stakeholder management plan will include information on who they are and how they will be impacted by the project. One of the tasks included in the project work plan will be to establish a communication program for the stakeholder community. Those communications will focus on answering questions for the stakeholders, providing them with status updates on the project and other information that will help them prepare for the change and adapt to the change. Using the examples above, we can introduce the following tasks to the work plan for these scenarios:
For the software upgrade we can provide an FAQ for the stakeholders that will include questions they have submitted about the software update and answers. The FAQ can be included in the communication plan along with status updates, meeting invites to demonstrations on new features and functionality as well as training opportunities.
Ideas for the office move could also include an FAQ that may provide details on parking, building security, office layout, coffee shops nearby, bus routes and subway stations within walking distance, restaurants close to the new office and even a “field trip” to the new office so that they can prepare for the change and ease into the changes.
I have witnessed a number of organizations that have done a great job sharing information with the stakeholders. When the project is finally delivered - there are no surprises. The people who are most impacted by the project were prepared and ready for the changes. I have also observed the reverse. Impacted stakeholders that were not engaged, prepared, or ready for the changes that the project introduced. The result can be frustration, chaos and disappointment. This is an easy fix! Identify your stakeholders up front, determine what the potential impact will be for those stakeholders, develop a communication plan that is clear, concise, and consistent and most importantly, design a comprehensive change management plan that will address the stakeholder needs with respect to how the project will impact them, personally.
You’ve got this!