What is Stakeholder Management?

Everything you need to know about stakeholder management

Do you need a better understanding of stakeholder management? Knowing how to manage stakeholders is a key skill that will help you lead your project to success.

What is a stakeholder?

A stakeholder is anyone who has interest in your project. That ranges from the sponsor, who has given you the directive for the project, to steering committee members who will help you remove roadblocks, to your actual team members who are the subject matter experts executing tasks, and to the person who is actually going to receive the deliverable of the project.

What is stakeholder management?

When it comes to the project, your stakeholders can make or break what is going on in your project from the standpoint of perception to the actual reality of what’s going on.

So, stakeholder management is about ensuring that you have proper communication and an accurate understanding of needs.

Look at stakeholders from under the umbrella of change management. The success of your project is not just about ensuring that you hit your deliverables but ensuring that you’ve brought all your stakeholders through the process of achieving your deliverable so that by the time it’s done, everyone is on the same page and they’re all excited.

Ultimately, it’s about managing different people with different needs and ensuring that everyone is on the same page.

Stakeholder Management Step 1: Identify your stakeholders

The first thing you need to do is get a complete understanding of who’s involved in the project.

Think about both internal and external stakeholders. The internal stakeholders are people within the organization like your sponsors, your steering committee, and your team members. The external stakeholders will depend on what you’re delivering. You might have a third-party vendor, or you may be delivering something to an outside consumer or customer, or you may have to think about government regulations, etcetera.

Identifying who all your stakeholders are is critical because you need to address and communicate with each one in a different manner since they all have different needs.

Stakeholder Management Steps 2-4

There are some more really important steps to stakeholder management, but those steps are easier to explain in a conversation with you. That’s why I’ve created a video that goes into detail on all things stakeholder management that will explain the rest of these steps really well.

Join me over on YouTube so we can finish this conversation together!

I really hope that you found this helpful – and if you did, it would mean so much to me if you would share it on your social media.

Every manager has to take on projects, so a great place to start as a new manager is learning some project management skills. If you're a new manager, do consider taking my SLAY Project Management online course where I show you step-by-step how to successfully manage a project, plus you get access to every template you will need, along with detailed video instructions on how to fill them out.

 -Adriana