5 Steps for Building Stakeholder Relationships
Ganesh is a project manager in Twinsburg, Ohio.
Have you led or been part of a project or program with disengaged stakeholders or sponsors? Did your project suffer from lack of timely decision making or late scope creep? If the answer is yes, you are not alone. Here I will share some steps you can take to improve stakeholder engagement.
It’s important to build a trusting relationship with your key stakeholders and stay connected throughout your project. Engaged stakeholders help motivate individuals through their active participation and timely resolution, which enables the project to stay on track.
Typically, project managers build trust and engage with key stakeholders at the start of a project; but as the project gets underway and team size grows, we lose sight of continuing those relationships. This generally leads to communication breakdowns, a gap in expectations, delayed decision making and sometimes even misalignment of project goals against organizational strategic objectives.
Here are five steps to follow:
1. Identify the key stakeholders. In any project or program, the project manager leading the initiative identifies all the impacted stakeholders to engage in planning, status reporting or managing dependencies. But my focus here is on how you engage your key stakeholders. Who are the key stakeholders? It depends on factors like the type of project, organization structure, industry, and internal
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Published at Wed, 11 Apr 2018 04:00:00 +0000
