Respect Stakeholders, Manage Expectations, Nurture Engagement

Success is spelled s-t-a-k-e-h-o-l-d-e-r.

Early in my career I was constantly frustrated by what I perceived to be the stupidity of the people connected with my project. My boss would let me rant and rave for a while and then quietly say, “You can’t control other people, you can only control how you react to them.”  Since then I have heard a variation of that statement many times, but never has it applied more clearly than when dealing with stakeholders.  We could modify that old adage to: “You can’t control stakeholders, you can only manage expectations … both theirs and yours.”

The more project managers achieve career success, the more likely it is that their actions, and the projects they run, will have important impacts on a wide array of people. These people could be strong supporters of the project – or they could block it.  For an organization to optimize the value it receives from projects, project managers must know how to clearly identify stakeholder expectations.  Knowing what stakeholders expect allows project managers to competently control stakeholder engagement … and this knowledge relies on getting to know the stakeholder, especially key stakeholders, and learning what it will take to satisfy them.

Although Stakeholder Management is now a Knowledge Area in its own right, we shouldn’t forget that it started out as an aspect of Communications Management. In managing stakeholder engagement and expectations, communications is king.

Sponsors Hold the Key
A few months ago I was teaching a project management overview course to a group of ten executives.  We got to the stakeholder management piece and identified the sponsor as a key stakeholder in nearly every project.  One of the executives listened for a minute and then said: “I have to confess – I have been a sponsor for probably 20 projects in my career and I don’t have a clue exactly what that means except to approve the budget.  Even worse, I don’t know what the project manager does except to manage the project and I don’t really know what that means, either.” 

Just in case readers of this blog are in the same quandary: Clarifying the roles of project managers and key stakeholders creates mutual understanding of what the expectations are on both sides.  Project managers begin the communication process by clearly identifying what the project needs from project sponsor and other key stakeholders, and to let the sponsor and other key stakeholders know what they can expect from the project manager. For some companies, this may be as simple as the sponsor approving the budget and the project manager sending periodic status reports. For other companies, the flow of information is much more detailed and frequent, and sponsors play a much greater role (my colleague Bill Athayde will be writing about the role of the sponsor in more detail in this blog series).

Organizations need to make it a standard practice for project managers to sit down with key stakeholders early on. They should schedule a meeting with each key stakeholder and prepare questions tailored to the stakeholder’s role in advance.  Direct (face to face if possible) communication is a key, since people are often quite open about their views when approached personally, and asking their opinions is frequently the first step in building a successful relationship.  Responses to these questions play an essential role in preparing a communication plan. 

Stakeholder management is critical to the success of every project in every organization. By engaging the right people in the right way on each project, project managers can have significant impacts on the success not only of an individual project, but of the organization as a whole.


Next up in this series: William Athayde explores a special case: the sponsor/stakeholder
 

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