What are stakeholder in our project business and how to manage them

What are stakeholder?

Stakeholder definition:  A stakeholder is an "individual or group that has an interest in any decision or activity of an organization."  

A stakeholder is either an individual, group, or organization that is impacted by the outcome of a project or a business venture.

Who are stakeholder?

Typical stakeholder categories are:

• internal staff, team members,
• internal management, other departments, management board
• customers (including shareholders, investors, and consumers), regulators, and local and regional communities. 
• suppliers,
• financial  institutions
• goverrment, legal , local authorities, 
• our family and friends
• and more

A stakeholder is either an individual, group, or organization that is impacted by the outcome of a project or a business venture.

Why are stakeholder so important?

Stakeholders have an interest in the success of the project and can be within or outside the organization that is sponsoring the project.

Stakeholders are very important because they can have a positive or negative influence on the project with their decisions. There are also critical or key stakeholders, whose support is needed for the project to exist.

What are the 3 stakeholder dimensions to consider?

We look at 3 Dimensions in our People, Results, and Systems framework.

How the PRS Framework People, Results and Systems) helps us to identify and communicate with the relevant Stakeholder

1. The People and our Relationships 

Here are some important questions to ask to identify our relationship with the stakeholder:

• How strong is our relationship with the person?
• What is the state of mind of that person?
• What are the personal needs, challenges, and ambitions of that person?
• How confident does the person feel about his/ her current position?
• What are their 2 predominant personality types? (In sales, we like to use the DISC Model to keep it simple)
• How does the project affect the emotional state of the person? 

2. The  project Results and the Stakeholder Goals 

• What are the business goals of the person?

• What are the business goals of an organization, Team?

• How does this project affect the personal, and career life of that person?

• Who are Results driver? 

The 3 most  common  stakeholder interest are:

• The directly or  indirectly  benefit of the project results
• They provide resources
• They finance the project

Business is about people and sometimes we are afraid of talking to the right people that could easily make our project happen.

One of  the biggest challenges is to align conflicting interests of different stakeholders. Like the one like chocolate ice cream and the other vanilla.

By understanding the interests and personal  goals behind the positions we can build a negotiation strategy and use empathy tactics to engage these stakeholders in our project to make it happen.

This biggest mistake I saw is that because we assume that a stakeholder is agains we just ignore him/ her or just not invite them to  the table and are surprised weh they suddenly out of the blue stop the project.

3. Systems we can use to analyze and manage stakeholder 

Many sales managers and business owners use copy and paste stakeholder maps and do not see the actual stakeholder landscape and lose money, miss including key stakeholders in the communication.

So what system we can use to make this process easy?

You’re going to have to learn to use stakeholder mapping techniques to identify who your key stakeholders are and make sure you meet their requirements.

• Stakeholder map
• Stakeholder rooster
• Stakeholder communication plan
• Stakeholder RACI Matrix
• Stakeholder Goals 
• Stakeholder attitude Tracker
• Stakeholder Power & Influence Matrix

If you are interested n using  the templates we use in our business please click here.

All Stakeholder templates Kit 

How can we engage with the project stakeholder 

Here are some powerful stakeholder communication and engagement tools

• Stakeholder Meetings
• Roundtable with stakeholders
• win-win negotiations with stakeholder
• Stakeholder Conferences
• Stakeholder Collaboration
• and more..

 You may use our  stakeholder communication plan template inside our stakeholder template kit.

 How to manage stakeholder?

By creating a stakeholder communication plan and mapping out our stakeholder goals, power  interests, attitude etc we can measure the stakeholder support  and intentipnally take strategic actions.

 Sometime si tis just the cal in time to move the needle.

A stakeholder is a person, like any other member of the project, and some will be easier to manage than others. Our bridge to all of our stakeholders is the communication.

We have different communication channels

• in person
• email
• slack
• moday.com
• webinar
• voxer
• whatsapp
• telegram
• instagram
• communities
• miro

and so much more

 I like to build a stakeholder community for a specific  project inside the Kajabi community app. Here we can chat, have meetups and can provide organized information about the project in a structured  conversational way. Kajabi hosts all replay and document and links are easy to find so that our stakeholder are up to date. Of  course w have clients  like  Large corporations that have their very own ecosystems.

We use online tools  like Monday. Miro, , Asana or Notion to share the project overview in real time. They are way more fun to us than Microsoft Sharepoint and MS Project as we have better collaboration.

Slack  and Voxer are  the go to tools for communication. Some of our clients use telegram, but we try to streamline the communication channels to keep the insanity.

We try  build a kind of online project family for a project to make it fun and connect the people form wherever.

Our experience shows that in person meetings are so important and if possible one per quarter is minimum to make magic happen and collapses timelines and speed up the project execution with high quality.

 Resources

 Ultimate Stakeholder Template KIT :Click here