Stakeholder Management using Social Network Theory

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, categorize and prioritize them based on their importance, impact, and power using alternative mapping tools, profile stakeholders, and prepare them for their participation, and to achieve the stakeholder management processes. The significant sight in project success is effective stakeholder engagement and communications between all stakeholders, where structured communication is adhesive that holds everything together. Communications Strategy sets the groundwork for the potential progress of the combined organization and effective communication can be served as a great technique to structure and manage the stakeholder at multiple levels. This article covers a viewpoint of the existing processes along with the challenges and uncertainty in stakeholder management. It specifically focuses on providing an effective communication tool as a solution for stakeholder management intending to fulfill the void in the existing literature. Communication and stakeholder interaction strategies are often characterized as fragile and dealing with various stakeholders, and designing suitable knowledge sharing information is critical because of unforeseeable project actions and uncertainty (1). In order to have successful stakeholder management, an effective communication strategy must be implemented. Hence, in this article, Social Network Theory is leveraged as an efficient tool for developing effective communication for stakeholder engagement at all levels. Besides, the article discusses the scope, methodology, application, and limitations of the tool. An overview of the existing Stakeholder Management process and optimize the solution for managing communication between the stakeholders will be the key takeaway from this article.

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Social Network Theory

Methodology