Consulting Essentials - Stakeholder Management
One of the most important enablers of a successful business transformation programme is to engage the organisation in the need for change and in the change itself. In particular, those people who will be impacted or will have an influence on decisions or approvals should be high on your priority list – I call these individuals stakeholders. This "Consulting Essential" focuses on Stakeholder Management.
For me, one of the early set-up tasks in any project is to identify who the key stakeholders are and to plan how to engage them. Here are some activities for you to try…
- Brainstorm with your client or project team the areas of the organisation that could be touched by your project in some way
- Print out the organisation charts for these areas of the business
- Review these charts with your client and identify who are the key stakeholders (remember those impacted and those who have influence)
- Capture the stakeholders name and position in a spreadsheet by business area
- Rate their relative importance as High, Medium or Low based on degree of impact and how much influence they have.
- Assign an accountability to each from the team
- Develop an engagement plan for each stakeholder to include type of communication and frequency.
- Implement the plan and review on a regular basis
Effective stakeholder management is not rocket science but I often see it done so badly on projects. Do it well and you really can accelerate your deliverables and get the right decisions made first time.