Excellent stakeholder management is critical for any programme success
Stakeholder management maps
A stakeholder management map is a vital control product that provides critical information about the pool of stakeholders and influential sponsors relevant to a programme.
Manage your stakeholder maps using live files owned by the project management office (“PMO”) within the single source of truth and update them regularly as new stakeholders get introduced and as others depart the programme.
By keeping an up-to-date stakeholder catalogue, not only that you will have easy access to invaluable information, but you would also help your more junior colleagues understand their client better before engaging them.
Expect visibility over the following type of information within a stakeholder map:
Level of seniority
Understand and leverage the level of experience and influence each stakeholder demonstrates before introducing your more junior team to them.
Contact details
Gather, maintain, and share an up-to-date database of contact details of all your stakeholders with your programme team.
Association with business units
Correlate your stakeholders with past and present roles and subsequent business units to improve your understanding of their ability to influence the decision-making process.
Reporting channels
Capture reporting information, including an organisational chart, line management data and escalation routes specific to your stakeholders.
Roles and responsibilities
Centralise other information about your stakeholders, including their roles and responsibilities, to find out how you can help them flourish in their objectives.
★★★★★ 5/5
My school of thought involves creating meaningful relationships with each stakeholder. This approach consists of understanding their unique perspectives about the programme and general ways of working. I also strive to develop robust long-term relationships by providing consistent professional responses and quick turnarounds.
Bogdan Ciocoiu
Partner
Stakeholder management methods and tools
Build informal relationships with your stakeholders whilst creating minimum traceability
Choose the right communication channels with your stakeholders
Develop formal relationships with your stakeholders whilst ensuring attention to details
Technology in stakeholder management
Stakeholder management can also rely on technology to improve one’s understanding of the ecosystem of stakeholders.
Geographical indicators
Create dashboards with graphical indicators and pointers to indicate which regions are covered by programme stakeholders.
Programme heat maps
Leverage BI and data visualisation to create easy to interpret views and indicate which stakeholders require a greater focus, potentially due to emerging risks and issues or an increased backlog of actions.
Dual-axis colour-coded visual
Use colour coding and a dual-axis matrix visual representation to indicate a departmental affiliation or the level of trust invested with each stakeholder.
Tabular deliverables tracker
Integrate stakeholder information with the programme deliverables tracker and enable your team to quickly identify contact details for relevant owners and support them with completing outstanding mitigation actions.
Senior leadership team, WorkStream Leeds, design authority, steering committee meetings
Engage multiple senior stakeholders to drive strategic decision making
Influence the decision-making process through high profile stakeholder meetings
Managing stakeholder expectations
Managing stakeholders involves finding a fine line between what both you and your stakeholders wish to achieve and getting a collaboration consensus across the table.
We, as managing consultant, specialise in identifying common ground between any two people involved in a project or programme and establishing the right conversations to identify common aims.
In all day-to-day work, we specialise in building long-term, meaningful relationships to help our clients improve their performance.
We form effective relationships with stakeholders at any level of seniority, including Directors, Deputy or Executive Directors or Partners.
However, as with Tuckman theory, stakeholder relationships can only gradually go up in quality and trust. Should there be a breach or any unmet expectations, a breakdown will likely happen, which will degrade the ties to the bare minimum.
Therefore businesses must allocate competent resources for client-facing roles to ensure that all stakeholder expectations are set out clearly and met at all times.
Successful stakeholder management creates engagement opportunities
Senior leadership team meetings
Workstream leads meetings
Design authority meetings
Steering committee meetings
internal vs external stakeholders
In our experience, there is an insignificant difference between internal and external stakeholders. This variation is not specific to the level of influence stakeholders have, but it relates to the duration of time needed for a stakeholder to mature its influence.
We operate on the principle of engaging and developing excellent relationships with both internal and stakeholders external to the programme.
While the definition of internal stakeholder is self-explanatory, external stakeholders may be of different types and have experience managing the categories set out below.
External stakeholder management
- Supply chain delivery partners including logistics such as transport as well as manufacturing and sourcing parts and equipment
- Principal designers and principal contractors as per CDM definitions as well as SME and specific engineering and construction disciplines
- Training, academies, learning providers, independent consultants, authorities and accrediting institutes
- Members from the local Administration or central government within the relevant directorate
Embed stakeholder management capabilities in program delivery
Stakeholder management in professional services
Deliver stakeholder engagement capabilities in operating model design engagements
Next steps
Contact us to talk about how we can improve your stakeholder management through our management consultants. We have a broad range of business design and transformation execution capabilities, and stakeholder management underpins all of them.