Stakeholder Management

Manage the Expectations, Work, Decisions, and Requirements of All Internal and External Stakeholders Without Doubling the?Work.

Working with internal and external stakeholders can be chaotic and time-consuming. From ongoing back-to-back meetings to keeping notes and final decisions in one place, to creating a customized Excel file for each stakeholder, ensuring they have an idea of what’s next and when their input will be needed. Overall, managing expectations, holding people accountable, ensuring the right people are involved at the right time, and making good decisions not only don’t get lost but are also made within a timeframe. This often results in multiple internal and external versions of each part of the process and siloed conversations that feel chaotic and take too much time in your day-to-day life, leaving you with very little time to actually do the work.

Stakeholder management is painful for cross-functional teams that often collaborate with other departments and need to get them involved and hold them accountable, product and design teams who are always waiting to get feedback from other team members, and consultants that are in constant collaboration with their clients, especially when their client is a team and they need to hold each team member accountable in different parts of the process.

— If this sounds familiar, you are not the only one!?

Millions of teams suffer from chaotic stakeholder management on a daily basis, and it is one of the main causes why organizations can’t scale or increase speed even if they hire additional people. In this blog post, we’ll share with you how our team has built a solution that will effectively help you collaborate and manage stakeholders.

Our team has spent over four years studying collaborations and stakeholder management and what the key ingredients are to hold people accountable, reduce the duplication of work(waste) to keep internal work private, keep clarity and consistency for internal teams, clients, and other external stakeholders, and keep everyone feeling in the loop at all times so there is never a sense of “unknown”.

At Nova, we wanted to ensure that:

1. You could build the workflow and determine what is visible to external stakeholders and what isn’t.
2. Keep internal notes invisible to external stakeholders while still maintaining them in the same place where the work and decisions are made.
3. Automatically hold stakeholders accountable, eliminating the need for weekly reminders and Excel files with tasks. Nova creates a custom agenda for each stakeholder, updating it in real-time.
4. Help you visualize when decisions are made and when clients and external stakeholders have provided their input.
5. Move some of your meetings to asynchronous meetings to free up more time for other tasks while maintaining the same level of collaboration as before, especially feedback and approval meetings.
6. Ensure everyone knows what they need to do — when they need to do it, and the role they play in each step of the process. In this case, not only team members but also clients and other external stakeholders, so there is a visual way to see the dependencies between people and how progress is being made.
7. Keep everything in one place, from your first brainstorming meeting and internal team retro to health surveys and design feedback and approval sessions with clients. Choose the level of involvement for each stakeholder and what should remain private.
8. Keep all your conclusions and decisions in one place, deciding when to share decisions with members in the next meeting or work session, and automatically creating a report on how decisions are made.

What would a client or external stakeholder see at?Nova?

At Nova, what an external stakeholder sees is customized by the team. All external stakeholders will be able to see your company name and logo and get access to their own agenda.

On the left side at the top, you will see your logo and company description, and in the same menu, stakeholders can filter based on tasks, agenda, and mentions.

1. All their tasks only.
2. Agenda or Calendar: Stakeholders will be able to see all work assigned to them, including meetings, approvals, tasks, etc. In this screenshot, we don’t have anything assigned to this stakeholder yet, but as soon as I invite them, they will see it, organized by date.

In the agenda, they will see tasks, meetings, and asynchronous sessions where they need to participate, and this will be filled out as you invite them. It’s ideal because it keeps tasks and other work on the calendar organized by the due date, and all of this gets updated as soon as your team makes changes. So, if a task due date needs to be changed, they will be able to see that and ensure they deliver it on time.

The calendar gives them direct access to tasks, whiteboards, surveys, feedback sessions, approval sessions, and more. External stakeholders can only see what is relevant to them and the things they need to be part of. The objective is to hold them accountable and ensure they provide input, approve things on time, and complete tasks they have been waiting for on time.

This means that on the team’s side, you have the capacity to decide what each stakeholder can see, and you can even block some of the sessions as team-only, so you never share “what shouldn’t be shared” with clients.

Internally and to external stakeholders, the space is very collaborative, easy to use, and visual. As team members, clients, and stakeholders collaborate, make decisions, or even get tasks done, you see that progress in real-time. So, if you get feedback before you expected, you can speed things up and move to the next phase.

It’s also great for remote teams and working with clients and stakeholders in other time zones because it helps you move some of your meetings asynchronous. And while you may not have had a great experience trying to send an email and getting people to provide feedback or approve something outside a meeting in the past, Nova has mastered this process and is already helping hundreds of teams collaborate asynchronously effectively. So, it’s a matter of how important it is for you to make that transition, and if you are ready to do something about all those meetings that are holding you back, because moving some of them asynchronous isn’t a problem anymore, and you can just try it on your next meeting.

I fully recommend starting by moving feedback and approval meetings to async meetings (we call them sessions). Your clients and external stakeholders will appreciate them too. Not only can you get everyone’s feedback faster without having to wait until next week because nobody had time this week, but also everyone is more engaged and more likely to provide well-thought-out feedback and insights during these sessions. With async sessions, collaboration is more effective, and the decisions made during the sessions are well thought out.

Who Uses?Nova?

1. Cross-functional teams with multiple departments and team members involved in decision-making, seek a simple solution to hold all departments accountable and keep their decisions organized.
2. Teams working with external stakeholders, such as clients, on a regular basis, spending too much time holding them accountable and duplicating their work to keep internal work internal.
3. Consultants looking for an effective way to provide a cohesive experience for their clients and keep all their work with clients organized while holding their team and clients accountable.
4. Teams with complex workflows aim to simplify and automate parts of their workflows without scattering their work across various platforms.
5. Teams seeking transparency and a visual representation of how decisions and work are accomplished, moving away from micromanagement and fostering a fair and transparent work environment.

How should you?start??

1. Self-start: Our platform is very user-friendly, so getting started shouldn’t be a major learning curve. Go to novatools.org, create an account, and begin your first project. Choose the sessions you want to share with your clients using this link. If you want to start by moving some of your meetings to asynchronous meetings, follow these steps: Start a project, add a session, and select “Async meetings.” Choose a template based on your objectives and provide the context you were going to share during the meeting in the session. Invite your team or clients, set a due date, and that’s it. To successfully implement async meetings, mention how you are going to try this new way of running some meetings with your team and clients during a meeting or through an email, and guide them through the process.
2. Get your Leadership team to start using the platform and introduce the platform directly from the leadership team. Discover our Leadership Hub here.
3. Contact our team and work with us for 1 hour to build an implementation plan that works for you.