Managing stakeholders is an exhausting and labor-intensive complicated process, but only if you let it. We get how easy it is to slip into a worn pattern of putting out fires and fixing problems one after the other. We are here to argue the way it could be different.
In this post, we answer some basic questions.
- What are stakeholders?
- What is stakeholder management?
- How should you communicate with different levels of power and interest?
Then, we’ll get into the higher-level topics, including
- How do I balance productivity with managing stakeholders?
- How do I manage stakeholders at the project’s beginning, middle, and end?
- Why should you be more proactive than reactive?
Each question is answered in detail below.
What Are Stakeholders?
“Stakeholder” is a broad term that captures every person or group vested in the outcome of a plan or project, on larger projects, that can include an incredible amount of people.
The title can stand for any of the following types of people.
- Investors
- Clients
- Donors
- Team Members
- Management
- End Users
- Press
- Regulatory Bodies and Government
An essential feature of a stakeholder is that they have either put something into the project or are looking to gain something from the outcome. There can be positive stakeholders who support the project and negative stakeholders who do not help it and have reason to end construction or thwart completion.
Investors
These are individuals, groups, or businesses that back a project with money, usually invested in the beginning to support the development. Like with any investment, they want to enjoy the benefit a completed project will provide, whether that be a piece of overall profit or some other kind of return.
Clients
Like an investor, clients have placed a good deal of financial faith into the outcome of a project or have literally purchased a specific outcome (i.e. owners building their home).
Donors
When the project is intended to benefit a specific group of people, especially those in less fortunate circumstances, the project will enjoy a good deal of financial support. They tend to have less input or power than other types of stakeholders, but when the financial input is greater, they usually get more say.
Team Members
These individuals have an interest that is focused on getting paid while the job is completed. They are looking to provide for themselves and their families and accelerate their careers. Their reliance on the project outcome is more about how it reflects on them as a team member and a contributor—that doesn’t dismiss their importance.
Management
Whether they are overseeing one project or multiple portfolios, management is an incredibly powerful stakeholder. They are what we call “internal” stakeholders who, similarly to the team members, see the project’s success as a reflection of their role. Managing stakeholders such as these can involve office politics and balancing interests more than any other type.
End Users
Just like the client relies on the end product, so does the end user. But these people generally have very small financial interests in the outcome, if they have any at all. They care a lot about how that result affects them, but, more often than not, they have little power over the outcome.
Press
Depending on the size, scope, and importance of your project, you may have members of the press watching you very closely. These are individuals or groups with an interest in how the project outcome affects the community. Press releases tend to be the result of those who want to stay either ahead of or in good faith with members of the press.
Regulatory Groups & Government
These bodies, groups, or governments can be extremely important stakeholders to manage and collaborate with for the well-being of your project. You often hear about construction projects having to thoroughly and proactively consider the perspective of multiple regulators so that their projects can exist at all.
What is Stakeholder Management?
Stakeholder management is the process of controlling the risks presented to the project through the relationships and experiences shared with anyone with a vested interest in the project outcomes.
It sounds complicated because it is.
This practice helps ease that burden by giving you a structure for creating/developing relationships, managing expectations, understanding/delivering stakeholder needs, and coordinating all the communication. For each type of stakeholder your project possesses, you need to know how you’ll inform them of changes—stakeholder management is how.
Parts of Stakeholder Management
Like risk management (and almost every other principle in project management), the bulk of the labor is in the preparation and planning. Proactive is the way to be, which is why the “understanding” element of managing stakeholders is so important.
We go into much greater detail about what that planning process includes here, but we’ll give you a hint for now. The main parts of stakeholder management include
- Stakeholder Analysis – understanding your stakeholders’ position, needs, and interests while gathering all necessary information for project success.
- Stakeholder Mapping – visually placing each stakeholder (or stakeholder group) into one of the following categories to better organize and plan communication techniques (high power/high interest, high power/low interest, low power/high interest, and low power/low interest).
- Active Management – the part where you use or execute these plans to manage outcomes and stakeholder expectations.
Communicating with Different Levels of Power and Interest
So far, we’ve talked only of the systems involved in stakeholder management, but not what this whole thing looks like in practice. We’ve developed stakeholder management as balancing ideas, needs, and relationships. These things are theoretical, making them all the more difficult to balance.
That’s why we place a lot of importance on things like mapping and analysis. You have to know the significance of each interaction and be extremely intentional. There are only so many hours of the day, and project managers deserve to have a life, too.
Below, we are going to break down each criterion you’ll need to understand and use when managing stakeholders.
High Power, High Interest
These are extremely influential people who hold a lot of the cards and have a lot of say. They have a seat in every room because their position is involved, and they likely have a lot on the line, in either literal currency or reputational currency.
They need to be kept “happy,” or at the very least, they need to be kept updated. These stakeholders will need to have the most access, the most privilege, and the most input. They’ll need to be consulted regularly as well.
High Power, Low Interest
These types of stakeholders are much more tricky because their position could change at any time. Managing stakeholders with little interest usually makes sure their opinion of the project doesn’t turn south. Regular communication and access are necessary, but you’ll need to let them define how much communication is too much.
Low Power, High Interest
This group is, by far, the most difficult to discuss because they are all different. We advise that when managing stakeholders in this position, you have to be careful to find harmony between ignoring them and understanding their needs and concerns. And we do not mean that you actually ignore them.
We mean you can’t. They may come off as the squeaky wheel, but their position could change, and they don’t like you because you never gave a hoot about what they had to say. So, these stakeholders should be given as much input and access as you see fit—but DO NOT ignore them.
Low Power, Low Interest
You’ll have to break that habit when managing a project, especially those with many stakeholders. This group may be off your radar, but that cannot be the case. The least of your efforts should be updating them. They should look like understanding their needs and concerns regarding the project.
Trust us when we say that even minimal effort goes far with this group.
Balancing Your Day, Communicating vs. Doing
Today professionals are often told to “find a balance” and “don’t be too hard on yourself” while the expectations for output are higher than ever. It’s counterintuitive, but we’ve all been there.
That being said, when you’re managing stakeholders, you have to work to find your perfect balance. Yes, you have to move information in all different directions at all different times. There are always topics that need discussing, emails that need sending, and fires that need extinguishing. But you also have to sit down and get work done occasionally.
And if you aren’t careful, communication can eat up all of your time.
So, how exactly do project managers balance the “doing” with the communicating?
Sadly, the answer isn’t all that exciting; you have to plan. Now, we are going to discuss what you are going to plan for and how you can implement this strategy for managing stakeholders (even if you are in the middle of your project).
Managing Stakeholders & What That Looks Like
As we mentioned, you have to decide for yourself when enough is actually enough. When someone was leaving work 100 years ago, they didn’t have to worry about the surprise email (pile of tasks) waiting for them when they got home. In 1923, they may have had to worry about how their children were going to survive polio but not being asked to “work” when they were home.
On the other hand, you can be asked to perform work-related tasks anywhere, at any time, thanks to the internet. (Yay! Thanks, internet!) That means you must draw clear lines in the sand regarding when you’re done, or else you’ll burn out faster than a woodpecker at a Christmas tree farm.
We get it. All of this talk about moving information, making sure the receiving party understands, and crafting a reply is a lot but extremely necessary. Not only that, but when you are managing stakeholders, you need to record that all of these transactions happened and what they held.
Some of the ways you could receive and deliver project-related information include
- Text messages
- Phone calls
- Emails
- Reporting in project management software
- Notes
- Social media
Without any type of structure, fielding, sorting, and storing all of that information would be a nightmare. You’d miss things all the time, and the number of fires you’d need to put out would steadily grow as the project went on. You’d also see a steady increase in grey hairs.
The sad reality is that few people attempt to control their schedule or communications, which means that most of you reading would heavily relate to the paragraph above. But that DOES NOT need to be the way. If you feel you are best in the morning, you can wiggle your meetings closer to earlier hours. You can even set that as a hard boundary for your regular meetings.
The opposite is also true. You can place most (if not all) of your meetings in the afternoon and only handle emails for one or two hours each morning. There is no way that everyone is going to work inside that structure, but you also don’t have to do everything in the best way for everyone else.
The most important aspect of managing stakeholders is regularity—you have to have a plan for checking in with people often and a clear plan for the next time. So, below, we are going to break down the planning process for each type of stakeholder for each stage of the project. The location of your work, the scale of the project, and the number of stakeholders involved will be unique to your project, which means you’ll need to adjust these ideas to size.
Managing Stakeholders at the Beginning of the Project
When we use the phrase “the beginning,” we mean the very beginning. Plans are being made. Introductions are happening everywhere you turn. New ideas are flying by your face faster than you can digest them.
Stakeholder influence can be felt at the start of a project. Plans are theoretical, meaning they can easily be adjusted to fit a person’s needs and interests. Scope creep can start here, too. The process of managing stakeholders starts before the project.
Your stakeholder management plan should include
- Introductory meetings with each stakeholder group possible where you clarify the project objectives and attempt to understand their needs
- A follow-up discussion about how likely or unlikely that outcome is
- A second follow-up that updates stakeholders on the likelihood or projected outcome of their change to the scope (this meeting might include an attempt at compromise if necessary)
If you have the ability to fully dictate your location and schedule, this next part will be more complicated.
As with any job, you need to work within the bounds that they give you, but in most project management roles—internal or external—you still have a good deal of flexibility when structuring your day. During a project’s planning or beginning stages, you’ll also need to complete your stakeholder analysis and mapping, which we discuss in detail here.
Once you’ve completed both of those tasks (which will be over longer a period of time for those on larger projects), you’ll better understand how often you’ll need to update or communicate with each group.
Managing Stakeholders in the Middle of the Project
In the middle of your project, you’ll see a dip. Stakeholder influence relaxes a little at this point because momentum is much harder to shift than plans. Updating is the name of the game at this stage.
For those whose approval and input you have to receive, you should be meeting with them weekly, even daily. You should plan to make a concentrated effort to update investors, donors, clients, management, and contractors that need information about 1) the current state of the project and 2) what considerations or hurdles lay ahead.
Your day might look like checking on the job site or checking with contractors for progress updates. At this point, you are seeing through the plans you set in the beginning.
You’ll be distributing reports and making sure that no hard feelings are festering. And by hard feelings, we are referring to issues raised by negative stakeholders or those who don’t support the project—they’d prefer it to not happen at all.
When the project is in full swing, you’ll be busy mitigating issues provided by negative stakeholders and empowering positive ones. It’s important to double-check with people and ensure their concerns are heard.
Managing Stakeholders at the End of the Project
Closing is a tentative process. Everyone is gearing up for the next thing while trying to ensure they get what they want. The Project Management Institute (PMI) talks about how stakeholder influence picks up again here.
When you think about it, it makes sense. Everyone is looking around at everyone else, trying to gauge reactions. On top of that, stakeholders being handed the (hopefully) completed project are checking off their lists to be sure they got everything they want.
You’ll want to end this part on a good note. Check in and attempt to define a clear closing or end date, whether that be the day the ribbon is cut or the day the final product is handed to the client; that’s up to you.
What you’ll want to aim for when managing stakeholders this far into the project is a clear end.
The Importance of PLANNING when Managing Stakeholders
Technically, you can start up a stakeholder management plan at any stage of a project, but it’s the most fruitful when done at the beginning. If you are in management yourself, you know what we mean. Planning is everything. Managing stakeholders can be painless, but that is only when the foundation is set early on.
Without it, you’ll always fight uphill and feel like you are losing. We cannot stress the importance of detailed, comprehensive, and well-thought-out plans for this process.
Get to know who you’re working with. Look into their backgrounds, find out their goals, and don’t be afraid to help them get it. #1. You’ll catch way more flies with honey. #2. Don’t be afraid to lay down some boundaries (but they’ll only work if you back them up).
If you have to start this process down the road, remember that honesty and transparency are your best policies. Let people know the “why” behind things, and you’ll quickly see the complicated process of managing stakeholders unfold before you.
