PLANNING STAGE (STAKEHOLDERS) : PLAN STAKEHOLDERS MANAGEMENT

Referring from Identifying stakeholders from initiation process group, we saw how the stakeholders are analysed in relation to their power, influences, interests, impacts, expectations and roles in the project. Stakeholders are people or organization such as the project sponsor, project manager, project team, customer, sellers (suppliers), competitors etc who are directly or indirectly involved in the project and can be or can not be affected by the project. Identifying stakeholders will help to plan strategies on how to engage, communicate and manage them effectively throughout the project life cycle based on the analysis of the needs, interests and impacts to the project.

The few inputs of Plan Stakeholders Management are:

• Stakeholder register whereby the information about stakeholders will help to plan ways to engage them
• Enterprise Environmental Factors whereby the management of stakeholders will depend on the project environment both internally and externally.
• Organizational Process Assets whereby through lessons learnt and historical information about stakeholders from previous projects will help us to plan effectively the stakeholders management for the current project.
• Communications Management plan as a component that will help to plan the methods used for communicating the stakeholders.
• Human resource management plan whereby the project team as a part of stakeholders will be staffed based on their roles and responsibilities of the project etc

You can only do this by doing the following:

• Using experts whereby through their judgement, it will ease to know the level of engagement needed for each stage of the project from each stakeholder. The experts can be senior managers, project team members, key stakeholders, previous project managers from the same projects, consultants and professionals.
• Have a meeting with experts and project team to define the level of engagement of stakeholders.
• Analytical technique whereby the engagement level of stakeholders is classified as follows

1. Unaware: the stakeholder is not aware of  the project and its impacts
2. Resistant: the stakeholder is aware of the project but he or she resists to change
3. Neutral: the stakeholder is aware of the project but does not show if he or she supports or resists it
4. Supportive: the stakeholder is aware of the project, its impacts and he or she supports the change
5. Leading: the stakeholder is aware of the project, its impacts and he or she is actively engaged in ensuring that the project becomes successful

The output of this process is Stakeholders Management Plan which will provide the management strategies to use in order to engage the stakeholders effectively. The plan will have:

• Desired and current engagement levels of the stakeholders
• Scope and Impact to change to stakeholders
• Interrelationships between stakeholders
• Stakeholders communications requirements
• Information to be distributed to the stakeholders
• Reasons of distribution of the information and its impacts
• Frequency for the distribution of information to the stakeholders
• Methods of updating the stakeholders management plan as project progresses

Note that this plan must be taken care with precautions by the project manager in order to avoid any damage to the project. Taking an example, Imagine how the stakeholder will react if he knows that he has been grouped as a resistant to the project. You never know, he may become a bad influence to other stakeholders. Therefore it is better to be aware how sensitive it is as a project manager.

References:

PMI (2013). A Guide to the Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide 5^th Ed.) USA, Project Management Institute

https://www.revolutionlearning.co.uk/stakeholder-analysis-the-powerinterest-grid/

Thank you and please don't hesitate to ask, suggest or comment below.

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