
Have you felt that you are spending more time managing stakeholders than managing your project?
As said, most time you can not manage time but you can manage priority.
The key to success in stakeholder management is to know your stakeholders and priorities them based on their influence on your project success based on their power and interest.
Stakeholder Management is the process by which you identify your key stakeholders and win their support. Stakeholder Analysis is the first stage of this, where you identify and start to understand your most important stakeholders.
Get the list of people (Stakeholders) and identify that some of these may have the power either to block or deteriorate your project work or to advance it. Some may be interested in what you are doing, while others may not care, so you need to work out who you need to prioritise.
You can map out your stakeholders, and classify them according to their power over your work and their interest in it, on a Power/Interest Grid.
The position that you allocate to a stakeholder on the grid shows you the actions you need to take with them to make your project successful.
High power, highly interested people = Manage Closely: you must fully engage these people, and make the greatest efforts to satisfy them. These are the stakeholders who are decision-makers and have the biggest impact on the project success and hence you must closely manage their expectations.
High power, less interested people= Keep Satisfied: put enough work in with these people to keep them satisfied, but not so much that they become bored with your message. These are the stakeholder needed to be kept in the loop, these stakeholders need to be kept satisfied even though they aren’t interested because they yield power. These types of stakeholders should be dealt with cautiously as well since they may use their power in a not desired way in the project if they become unsatisfied
Low power, highly interested people = Keep Informed: adequately inform these people, and talk to them to ensure that no major issues are arising. People in this category can often be very helpful with the detail of your project.
Low power, less interested people = Monitor: again, monitor these people, but don’t bore them with excessive communication.
This analysis will also help you prepare RACI – Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed matrix as well.
Reference
https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newPPM_07.htm
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