Section 7.2 Stakeholder Management

Question: Describe the elemenst of a stakeholder process; make five points in your answer and draw a suitable diagram

Answer: 1. Identify. All stakeholders who have an interest, are impacted by or are involved in the project need to be identified. These may be internal or external to your organisation. The stakeholders can be identified by facilitated workshops, reference to organistaioon charts, talking to peers and from stakeholders themselves.

2. Assess. Once stakeholders are identifed we need to assess their level of interest and power/influence both for and against the project. A useful way to do this is to plot each stakeholder on a 2 x 4 grid using power and interest as the axes. See diagram. (Pretend I’ve drawn a diagram such as in the BoK or page 126 of the manual)

3. Plan. A plan is produced detailing the means of communication for each stakeholder. A stakeholder of high power and interest may well be best served by face to face meetings as compared to someone or group of low power and interest who may only receive a monthly newsletter. Also in the plan will be tactics to use the high interest stakeholders to influence and evangelsie the project to those who are negative to the project.

4. Implement. Once the plan is produced it needs action to influence and inform the stakeholders. As the plan is implemented so more information will become available and re-assessment of the stakeholders on the grid will be required. The plan is then amended to take into account this new information. This will re-iterate throughout the project lifecycle.

5. Monitor the plan. We need to ascertain if the actions taken ahve had the intended consequences and be alert to unexpected consequences as well. As stated above the grid will be revisited regularly to asess the plan and make changes if needed. This constant monitoring will also feed into our leassons learned.

I look forward to receiving comments.

Paul