How can you leverage stakeholder champions and advocates to improve IT Consulting?

2 Why are they important for IT consulting?

Stakeholder champions and advocates can be highly beneficial in improving your IT consulting. They can offer valuable insights, feedback, and resources to better understand your client's needs, expectations, and challenges. Furthermore, they can communicate and demonstrate the benefits of your project to other stakeholders who may be skeptical or indifferent. Additionally, they can help resolve or prevent conflicts and issues that may arise during your project, such as scope creep, budget cuts, or technical glitches. Moreover, they can enhance your reputation and credibility as an IT consultant and increase your chances of getting referrals, repeat business, or new opportunities.

3 How can you identify them?

To identify your potential stakeholder champions and advocates, you need to conduct a stakeholder analysis. This process involves mapping out who the key players are in your project, what their interests, concerns, and expectations are, and how much power and influence they have. You can use tools such as stakeholder matrices, charts, or maps to visualize and categorize your stakeholders. When looking for stakeholders who have the potential to be champions or advocates of your project, you should look for those who have a high level of interest and involvement in it, as well as a positive or neutral attitude. Additionally, they should have a high level of authority and influence over other stakeholders as well as a good network of relationships. It's also important that they have a clear understanding of your project's goals, scope, and deliverables, and that their values, vision, and approach are aligned with yours. Lastly, they should trust in your expertise and professionalism.

4 How can you engage them?

Engaging stakeholder champions and advocates requires regular, clear, and effective communication. Establishing and maintaining a rapport with them and showing appreciation for their support is essential. Additionally, it’s important to share relevant information and updates, invite their feedback and input, seek their advice on how to address any challenges or risks, involve them in project activities, and ask them to advocate for your project. Make sure to provide them with the necessary tools and messages. Acknowledging their role and impact is also key to successful stakeholder engagement.

5 How can you measure their impact?

To measure the impact of your stakeholder champions and advocates, you need to track and evaluate their performance and outcomes. This includes defining and agreeing on indicators and metrics that will show their effectiveness, collecting and analyzing data to demonstrate their achievements, reporting and celebrating their success, soliciting and acting on their feedback, and sharing lessons learned and best practices. By leveraging stakeholder champions and advocates, you can build trust, deliver value, create opportunities, improve IT consulting, enhance project success, and increase client satisfaction.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?