Stakeholder Management
Do you know how engaged your stakeholders are with your projects?
I recently attended a workshop to help develop a guidance note on Stakeholder Management, which is being sponsored by an Royal Institution and Project Management organisation.
The workshop was hosted in a room overlooking Parliament Square and the Houses of Parliament – I wondered how Stakeholder Management is applied by the “Party Whips” in the Commons?
Some background information was presented with regards to the significance stakeholder management has on the outcome success of projects. With regards to causes of unsuccessful projects “Lack of effective engagement with stakeholders” was listed 3rd out of the 8 points based on information from the Cabinet Office / NAO Common causes of Project Failure – 2004.
Looking at 78 studies in the past 35 years into project & programme success, four Critical Success Factors were identified as enabling success. These were:
- Clarity of Objectives
- Strategic Risk Management
- Leadership
- Stakeholder Engagement
Implementing Stakeholder Engagement
The workshop covered a number of activities such as the Table of Contents and structure of the guidance note, which was basically try and keep it simple and provide case studies to illustrate the points.
The other aspect the workshop identified towards the end of the day was it needs to be practical for people to implement and not cause too much extra work, easy to use and communicate the status of stakeholder engagement. There are many matrices that you can use but typically have two axis’s, so which one do you use?
Visual Stakeholder Engagement Management
What if you could combine all of these into a multi view of the same data?
Using SharpCloud makes this possible. You can easily identify all of the stakeholders, type of stakeholder, all assessed against various key attributes such as:
- Importance
- Influence
- Power
- Technical understanding
- Social understanding
- Stakeholder Engagement Status
Using the various views within Sharpcloud you can list your stakeholders and start to assess them against attributes you consider to be important to the success of your project. The outcome is for you to establish a stakeholders profile and assess their engagement status with regards to whether they are:
- Active support
- Passive support
- Neutral
- Passive opposition
- Active opposition
Proactive Stakeholder Engagement
Now that you know who your stakeholders, how they can impact your project/programme success you can know start to take proactive stakeholder engagement activities to move stakeholders from Opposition to Supporter and ensure your supporters stay as a “raving supporter”.
Free SharpCloud Demonstration and a R-VCS Stakeholder Engagement App
You probably have this information all ready captured on a spreadsheet and communicated via a presentation such as PowerPoint.
Wouldn’t you agree this is a time consuming, high maintenance and an ineffective way of doing what is a critical success factor to the success of your project.
Claim your complimentary R-VCS Stakeholder Management App, powered by SharpCloud so you can start identifying and proactively managing your stakeholder engagement quickly and easily.
Click on the orange button below “Contact Roelto”, leave your details in the following form and request a R-VCS App | SharpCloud demonstration so you can start using your Stakeholder Management app immediately.
Warmly,
Jason
