Stakeholder Management Strategies

Abstract

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.

By Shubham Ingole

Challenges in Stakeholder Management

The major challenges in managing stakeholders are due to ineffective or insufficient communication which is the root cause of the problem in a project. The root cause is evident to sub causes such as unclear scope, a lack of understanding of the brief, inefficient coordination in the cross-function team, and inefficient risk management. The project is more likely to fail if the amount of time spent on creating plans will be fade due to consistency in the flow of information to the right people, or it has been constantly ignored and misunderstood which makes it more ineffective. A survey by (Kirti Rajhans) on effective communication revealed that the main issues address these challenges are Information distortion, delay in information, miscommunication between key stakeholders, conflicts between the client and the contractors, or internal conflicts between the team, lack a single point of contact, which are related to lack of communication. Further, uncertainties in managing a project may arise from the beginning and that need to be addressed.

Uncertainty in Stakeholder Management

In the initial stage of the stakeholder management process identification and analysis might consume more time in and it varies based on the number of stakeholders involved in the project. A mega project like apollo 11 or Sydney’s Opera house constitutes more uncertainty and complexity and hence the assessment requires an adequate amount of work in regard to time, cost, and value creation. As the name states the amount of information is limited and it becomes more difficult to predict the future outcome. Since the processes of the project are not measurable based on the factors power, interest, influence. Thus, developing management strategies for a project comes along with multiple assumptions and limited robustness analysis of the project.

Reference

1. ISO 21500, Guidance on Project Management. 2. PMBOK(Project Management Body of Knowledge) Guide – 5th Edition (2017). 3. Freeman, R. Edward, and McVea, John, A Stakeholder Approach to Strategic Management (2001). Available at SSRN: [1] or [2] 4. [3] Strategies for Dealing With Difficult Stakeholders, By Ian Haynes, September 25, 2020