Projects themselves bring a certain kind of political environment, everyone wants a say in the project and some stakeholders have the power to make their will happen. Managing these people can help you keep the project complexity in line and make sure that you still deliver the best product possible. Stakeholder drive projects, and to completely bar them would surely make your project fails, so by greasing the joints a little you can ensure that everyone plays nice.
Stakeholders can be any number of people involved in a project from regulators, client users, and C-suite executives. In general, there are two kinds of stakeholders, internal and external. Internal stakeholders are those that exist within your client's organization, those people who call the shots behind the scenes of your direct contact for your client. These stakeholders can all have differing opinions and ideals for the project and your contact is the
one that has to manage the conversion on both sides. Satisfying all the internal stakeholders in near impossible as you have no direct contact with them as they are most likely eventual users of your product. External stakeholders are people not attached to your client but still hold some interest in the project. These can include regulators, financers, and people who may be affected in some way by your project. These are the most commonly recognized stakeholders, but that does not make them any more important than internal stakeholders.
Stakeholder analysis is a way to try and manage all stakeholders and try to form one group consciousness to appease. The first step is to identify the stakeholders you are dealing with, list them out as it will be much easier to know who you are working with. The second step is to go one by one and determine the power/interest that each one of them holds, you can list
them in a matrix to get a graphical representation of the playing field. The last step is to uncover the true thoughts of each stakeholder, do these stakeholder groups think positively or negatively about your project? This is basic analysis and helps set the horizon on who you must manage the most versus those you can please with little effort.
Strategies to manage stakeholders depends on their power and views of your project. If a stakeholder has high power and a positive view your main interest is to keep them content, keep them informed on the project and support their wants; On the other hand if a stakeholder is high power but has a negative view of your project your main interest pivots to be helping them understand the subtle nuances of your project and hope to swing their views to a more positive manner. For low power stakeholders, the plan is mostly the same, but you don’t have to worry about them quite as much, for positive ones you want to make sure to keep them content and keep them updated but for the negative ones you might want to consider trying to swing their views but don’t let it bog you down as they don’t have the power to affect your project in the ways that others might.
Overall managing stakeholders is a necessary responsibility to make sure that your project does not increase in complexity due to outside demands. Forcing everyone to agree is impossible, but by doing a little work and figuring out what each person wants you can effectively manage expectations and even forge new working relationships with those who think negatively about your project.
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