Stakeholder Management With Social Network Theory

Author: Shubham Ingole

Stakeholder Management is a substantial practice that needs to be focused on throughout the life cycle of the project. A successful collaboration between an organization and its stakeholders is based on working together to achieve common objectives. (PMBOK). Stakeholder management is a significant step towards the project's success, in terms of Project, Program, and Portfolio management. In practice, various frameworks have been built for efficient and effective stakeholder management in a project. It aims to identify all the relevant stakeholders, in order to categorize and prioritize them based on their importance, impact, and power using alternative mapping tools, to profile stakeholders, and prepare for their participation, and to achieve the stakeholder management processes.

The significant sight in project success is effective communications between all stakeholders, where structured communication is adhesive that holds everything together. Effective communication can be served as a great technique to structure and manage the stakeholder at multiple levels. Besides, the Communications Strategy sets the groundwork for the potential progress of the combined organization. Communication and stakeholder interaction processes and strategies are often characterized as 'fragile,' dealing with various stakeholders, and designing suitable knowledge sharing messages is difficult because of unforeseeable project actions and uncertainty, and it is difficult to establish reliable means to evaluate progress or even success in engaging stakeholders effectively (Kirti Rajhans). A slice of stakeholder management is also to have an effective communication plan. This article offers a critical viewpoint of the existing Stakeholder management strategies, intending to fulfill the void in the literature. The focus of this article is to shed light on key challenges and uncertainties in stakeholder management, by leveraging Social Network Theory an effective methodology with a framework to use communications as an efficient tool for managing successful stakeholder connection at all levels.