Stakeholder management

The importance of stakeholder management is to support an organization in achieving its strategic objectives by interpreting and influencing both the external and internal environments and by creating positive relationships with stakeholders through the appropriate management of their expectations and agreed objectives. Stakeholder Management is a process and control that must be planned and guided by underlying Principles.

Stakeholder Management, within business or projects, prepares a strategy utilising information (or intelligence) gathered during the following common processes:

• Stakeholder Identification - Interested parties either internal or external to organisation/project. A stakeholder map is helpful for identifying the stakeholders^[1].

• Stakeholder Analysis - Recognise and acknowledge stakeholder's needs, concerns, wants, authority, common relationships, interfaces and align this information within the Stakeholder Matrix.

• Stakeholder Matrix - Positioning stakeholders according to the level of influence, impact or enhancement they may provide to the business or its projects.

• Stakeholder engagement - Different to Stakeholder Management in that the engagement does not seek to develop the project/business requirements, solution or problem creation, or establishing roles and responsibilities. It is primarily focused at getting to know and understand each other, at the Executive level. Engagement is the opportunity to discuss and agree expectations of communication and, primarily, agree a set of Values and Principles that all stakeholders will abide by.

• Communicating Information - Expectations are established and agreed for the manner in which communications are managed between stakeholders - who receives communications, when, how and to what level of detail. Protocols may be established including security and confidentiality classifications.)

Stakeholder Agreements (A collection of agreed decisions between stakeholders. This may be the lexicon of an organisation or project, or the Values of an initiative, the objectives, or the model of the organisation, etc. These should be signed by key stakeholder representatives.

Contemporary or modern business and project practice favours transparent, honest and open stakeholder management processes.

References

1. ^ Stakeholder Management Overview, Rob Llewellyn, May 2009