Manage Stakeholder Engagement

Managing stakeholder engagement is the process of communicating and working with stakeholders to meet their needs and expectations, address issues, and foster appropriate stakeholder involvement.   All lessons are based on the PMBOK®, 7th Edition.  

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Transcript

Managing stakeholder engagement is the process of communicating and working with stakeholders to meet their needs and expectations, address issues, and foster appropriate stakeholder involvement. The key benefit of this process is that it allows the project manager to increase support and minimize stakeholder resistance. This process is performed throughout the project. 

Manage Stakeholder engagement involves activities such as:

●     Engaging stakeholders at appropriate project stages to obtain, confirm, or maintain their continued commitment to the success of the project

●     Managing stakeholder expectations through negotiation and communication

●     Addressing any risks or potential concerns related to stakeholder management and anticipating future issues that may be raised by stakeholders

●     Clarifying and resolving issues that have been identified

This helps to ensure that stakeholders clearly understand the project goals, objectives, benefits, and risks of the project, as well as how their contribution will enhance project success.

This sounds all good, but how do we do this? There are three major skills that you should have: communication, interpersonal and team skills.

Communication skills use several methods to gather feedback from the stakeholders. This includes:

●     Conversations, both formal and informal

●     Issue identification and discussion

●     Meetings

●     Progress reporting and 

●     Surveys

Interpersonal and team skills is something you develop over time and are really important as you manage projects. Some skills are:

●     Conflict management: how to get opposing stakeholders go to their corners

●     Cultural awareness and differences like expecting someone in China to work during Chinese new years

●     Negotiations: Resolve conflicts and try to get to a win-win situation 

●     Observations/conversations: Stay in touch with the work and attitudes of the project teams and stakeholders

●     Political awareness: There are always power play in organizations and that can affect your project. 

Put this all together and now you have to do meetings. Yes, dreaded meetings but it is necessary to make sure that everyone is on the same page of the project. During meetings, you can accomplish the following:

●     Decision making

●     Issue resolution

●     Lessons learned and retrospectives, 

●     Project kick-off

●     Sprint planning  and

●     Status updates

When you are done with any meetings and conversations, follow up with what was decided. You can create a change request log that lists what changes were made and who made them. Or a log that captures all the issues that were found. Even better, update a status sheet and have a recording from the meeting. I can’t tell you how many times that has helped me when a stakeholder contradicts something they agreed on. 

That is your PMP in a Snap. Talk to you next week.