PMI CAPM – Identify and Engage Stakeholders in a Project

1. Section Overview

You’ve now reached the new knowledge area in the Pembach Guide fifth edition, and that’s project stakeholder management. Stakeholders, we know are the people, groups and organizations that are affected by our project or our project can be affected by them.

So in this knowledge area, this new knowledge area, we’re going to look at several processes dealing with stakeholders management. You’re going to see that a lot of this ties back to chapter ten of the Pinbach on communications management. So there is some parallelism that happens between communications management and stakeholder management. We begin by talking about identifying stakeholders. This will be your first process to identify stakeholders. You want to do this early, early in the project.

So remember, we have the charter and we identify stakeholders. So it’s early, you don’t want to get late in your project and you’ve not identified people, people won’t be happy with you. Then, as part of this process, we’re going to classify stakeholders.

We’re going to look at interest, influence, involvement, and then we can begin to do some analysis here about finding out who are decision makers, who are our customers, who’s a manager. So we have to interview stakeholders to get an assessment and do some analysis. It also helps us to identify other stakeholders in the project. I want you to pay attention to three grids in this section. I’m not going to tell you what they are, but there are three colorful, interesting grids. So pay attention.

You’re going to see that in this section, it’ll be part of our stakeholder analysis and that will help us lead us to our stakeholder management plan about how will we engage stakeholders, what’s their current level of engagement? What’s our goal for engagement, what about communication requirements? So back to communications management, what’s going to be distributed? Why are we distributing it and when will we distribute it? Then we get into manage stakeholder Engagement 13 three manage Stakeholder Engagement that we want to keep stakeholders engaged, that we want to obtain, confirm and maintain stakeholder engagement. And we want people to feel a sense of ownership, to be bought in, to have buy in, to know that they’re valued and appreciated.

I think so often we do a kickoff meeting, everybody’s happy and excited about the project and then it begins to fade away because there’s not follow up, there’s not a consistent engagement to keep people involved and excited. So we want to make sure that we’re doing that. So we’re going to talk about communication methods to engage stakeholders, back to those interpersonal skills and management skills and then taking actions to actively engage stakeholders. So relying on information management, going out and meeting with stakeholders face to face, communication is the best communication.

And then we’ll have to be honest and direct with project news, good or bad, so we don’t hide news from stakeholders. So a lot of important things in this new knowledge area in the PEM. All right, let’s hop in now and try it out, and I’ll see you at the end of the section or the next lecture.

2. Identify Project Stakeholders

One of our two project initiation processes is to identify project stakeholders. So this is a really important activity that we want to do early in the project. We don’t want to overlook stakeholders. If you overlook people, probably not going to be real happy with your project. So identify project stakeholders happens really early in the project and this sets us up to engage and then to manage that engagement. And this is the first of the new processes in this new knowledge area with stakeholder management. In pinbox five to identify stakeholders, we are identifying the people, the groups and the organizations. We’re documenting that information, we’re defining how stakeholders could affect the project. And then, as I mentioned, this is a new knowledge area in the Pembach Guide, fifth edition. So want to pay attention to this information.

As you’re paying attention to all the information in the course. Let’s look at our edo here to identify stakeholders. The charter procurement documents, EEF and OPA tools and techniques, stakeholder analysis. So we’re going to talk about that tool and technique in a moment. Expert judgment and meetings. And then the outputs here will be a stakeholder register. The stakeholder register is a directory of all the stakeholders. But it’s more than just their contact information. It’s what are they interested in in the project, what are their threats or perceived threats or what are their goals or objectives for your project. So who are stakeholders? Well, they are the people and the organizations that are affected by your project.

They’re involved in the project and then they can affect your project positively or negatively. And generally they can exert some influence over project decisions. As we go about identifying project stakeholders, we need to think about what people and what groups are affected by the work that we’re doing. And then we think about, well, who can exert influence, who can make decisions over our project? So we want to do this early in the project. If you go along little ways in your project and then you realize you forgot to include some stakeholders, they are not going to be happy with you about your project. So we want to do this early in the project. We can also begin to develop or use some OPA to develop a stakeholder management strategy.

The goal of the stakeholder management strategy is we want people engaged. We want people to feel a sense of ownership and buy in into what we’re doing here in this project. As we begin to identify stakeholders, we can classify stakeholders based on their interest in the project, how much influence do they exert and to what depth will be their involvement. That’s generally not something you’re going to put out for the public to see, but it’s a way to categorize and that will help your engagement and communication with stakeholders.

To perform stakeholder analysis, we have to gather all potential stakeholders and their information. We want to think about who are key stakeholders. And I’ve mentioned that idea of key stakeholders a couple of times through the course. So just to nail it down, the idea of a key stakeholder are people who have a decision making role that they can decide and influence. Your project based on that decision could be a management role.

And always your primary customer, if you think about the project team members, they can make decisions, you think about vendors, they can make decisions. Managers, especially in a functional and matrix environment, they can make decisions that affect your project. And then certainly our customers can make decisions because they have to approve it. They have the ability to make change requests and to approve different phases of the project, so they can certainly affect our project progress. Begin identifying stakeholders. One of the best ways to do this is to interview known stakeholders, and in that conversation, we’ll ask that stakeholder, who else should I talk to about this? Is there anybody else in our organization that you think needs to be involved?

So if you don’t know, or even if you do know, it’s always good to get people’s perspective as to who they might see. So that’s using expert judgment. Who else can help you identify stakeholders and begin analyzing those stakeholders? Let’s look at this idea of stakeholder analysis, and by creating a grid, helps us to better manage stakeholders and really better manage our time. So these have a couple of different flavors here. We have a power interest grid, a power influence grid, or an influence impact grid. In this grid, we have people that have a high amount of power and a high amount of interest, or influence or impact, whichever variation of this you’re using.

I’m doing a power interest, obviously here, so a high amount of power, a high amount of interest will be up in the red quadrant, we want to manage those stakeholders closely. Stakeholders that have a high amount of power, but a low amount of interest, those are in that yellow quadrant. We’ll keep those people satisfied and then the next one down. People that have a high amount of interest, but a low amount of power, we keep informed. And then we have those people that have a low amount of power, a low amount of interest, those we monitor.

So in this grid, what you would do is, this is how you would group people based on power and interest. You can also do a salience model where you use power, urgency and legitimacy. So how much power do they have, how urgent are they as far as information, as far as deliverables? And then are they even a legitimate stakeholder? All of this though, is a way to group and to set us up for stakeholder engagement. The stakeholder register, as I mentioned, it’s a directory of all of your stakeholders. So their identification information, their assessment, so how much power influence, what decisions do they make, how do they contribute, what are their objectives for the project.

All of that kind of business goes into the stakeholder register. And this is also where we classify stakeholders. We can classify stakeholders based on their decisions, level of interest, their power, their influence. But you could also do stakeholder classification, like end user, professional engineer, architect, developer, designer, whatever it may be. But it’s a way that you can quickly sort out your stakeholders. So a little database here would be ideal. That’s it. That’s our first topic in this new domain, Mpmbok Five. So keep moving forward. In the next topic, we’re going to talk about planning, stakeholder management. So I’ll see you in just a few minutes.