Natasha Baker’s Three-part Series On Stakeholder Analysis

Stakeholders are not just clients and include everyone involved in a project or company development. Once you’ve nurtured your alliances and have their attention, you can’t let that attention interest drop. Find ways to keep your stakeholders involved at all levels. Be creative when it comes to keeping stakeholders involved. Natasha Baker’s three-part series on Stakeholder Analysis that offers great tips on what levels stakeholders should be involved in, setting rules for project managers, and knowing when a client stakeholder needs to be short-leashed; especially if the stakeholder is a client and refuses to attend initial project planning sessions and lacks the ability to provide any real content or comments regarding the project.

Maintain Your Alliances

Now that you’ve got your stakeholders where you want them and offering the benefits you need, you need to maintain your stakeholder alliances. This is best achieved by communication, required input from stakeholders, and levels of participation. Part of creating alliances with stakeholders is letting them know you want them involved and not avoiding or curtailing their contributions. Finally, all relationships need nurturing, including those relationships you have with stakeholders. Learn good tips on collaborating with your stakeholders. Be open, be assertive, and agree to disagree at times to ensure your stakeholder alliances remain strong.

Group work and decision-making can be a disorienting and disheartening process

Have a roadmap to get your group to clear decisions and early wins for long-term success. We’ve all been there: you find yourself in a long meeting for a workgroup without clear goals or deadlines. What do you do? To avoid having people skip meetings or drop out entirely, Rutas provided and stuck to a clear roadmap with well-defined rules that has led members to early wins, keeping them motivated and on track.

Alliances require strong staff support

Provide support to allow alliance members to effectively contribute. By signing up to make changes in how they work internally and with other members, each alliance participant has already taken a big step. Their responsibilities are to share information, consider and refine options, make decisions, and implement changes internally. All other activities, such as developing meeting agendas and synthesizing input into proposals for the alliance to consider, fall to the alliance’s staff support or backbone organization. I’ve seen alliance members offering to take on additional tasks because they see that their expanded contributions lead to even more real progress.