CompTIA Project+ PK0-004 – Managing the Project Stakeholders

1. What’s a stakeholder?

Identifying stakeholders is a project management process that you want to do as early as possible in the project. What you don’t want to happen is to be months into your project and then suddenly discover a group of stakeholders that you have not contacted before. That group is not going to be very happy with you, and they’re probably going to have some influence that can change your project. So identifying the stakeholders, you want to do as quickly and as early as possible. Well, we have to answer the question, well, who are stakeholders? Well, stakeholders, you know, are the people, the groups, the organizations, anyone that is affected by the outcome or the existence of your project. And then we document that stakeholder information.

And this allows us to define how those stakeholders affect the project, but also how the project affects those stakeholders. Now, this is a new knowledge area in the Pinbox Guide, fifth edition. So I guarantee you’re going to see some questions on this on your exam. Now, this project management process, we have several inputs, a few tools and techniques, and just one output of identifying the project stakeholders. So the project charter, or rather procurement documents. Now, procurement documents, the reason why it’s here as an input is you may be dealing with vendors, enterprise, environmental factors, and organizational process assets, tools and techniques to identify. You do stakeholder analysis.

So you go to the stakeholders that you do know exist and you ask them who else should be involved. Expert judgment. So your team, consultants, SME’s, people in your organization, they can all help you identify stakeholders throughout the that are affected by your project. And then meetings, the only output is the stakeholder register. And the stakeholder register is a database of all of your stakeholders and your characteristics of those stakeholders. As you identify stakeholders, you’re looking for people and organizations that are affected by the project, but also people that are involved in the project. Now, stakeholders can be affected positively or negatively.

So you have positive and negative stakeholders, and then some of these will exert influence over the project. So based on the amount of authority they have in the project, what you can do is you can classify stakeholders based on their interest, their influence or involvement. So those that are very interested and that have a high amount of power or a high amount of influence, those are the ones, ones that you have to keep satisfied. And then, of course, involvement like your project team. But there could also be some executives or who knows, but it’s just how involved are these people in the project that you’re doing? So, a very important project management process.

2. Performing stakeholder analysis

As a project manager, you’ll have to analyze and engage the stakeholders. This is something that you do because you want stakeholders to feel involved and to feel a sense of ownership of the project. So how you do these analytical techniques? You begin by asking questions, talking, working with your stakeholders, meeting with them, communicating with them, not just to them. One of the first things you’ll do is you’ll ask who are the stakeholders? And then when you meet those stakeholders, you ask that question again. You ask who else should be involved in the project? And then you classify the stakeholders. For example, in it, we might say we have end users, but within end users, we have different types of people. We have administrative assistants and accountants and salespeople and marketing people and so on.

And they’re each going to have a different perspective and concerns about the project. So by creating this classification for stakeholders, then we can speak intelligently to their concerns, threats, and perceived threats. And how we engage those different types of classifications for stakeholders will really direct us in the project. So, in other words, when we talk with administrative assistants, we can speak from their perspective and their concerns, and we talk with accountants, what’s important to them or the salespeople. So that’s really the goal here, is finding out what’s important to each stakeholder and seeing the project from their perspective and their point of view. Stakeholder engagement levels is a way to describe how stakeholders may perceive your project or their attitudes towards your project.

Some stakeholders are unaware where they didn’t even know your project was happening or your project was going to affect them. Resistant stakeholders are somewhat negative. They’re not a big fan of your project, and they’re resistant to change. They don’t want the project to happen. Neutral stakeholders don’t really care if your project happens or not, or successful or not. So some neutral stakeholders might be like inspectors in a construction project or vendors that you’re getting materials from. Supportive stakeholders are they want your project to happen and they’re happy that it’s happening and they want to help you complete the project as planned. Now, leading stakeholders are, like, supportive, but they’re leading the charge. They’re like your cheerleader or champion of the project. So, like, the project sponsor is usually a good example of a stakeholder who is leading. Thank you.

3. What’s in the stakeholder management plan?

In the Pinbach Guide fifth edition, there is a new project management domain and it’s called Plan Stakeholder Management. This domain creates the stakeholder management plan and that’s what we’re going to talk about in this lecture. Planning stakeholder management means that we develop management strategies for stakeholder engagement. We do an analysis of stakeholder needs. This is an ongoing activity and also we create a clear plan for managing and engaging to stakeholders. This process requires the project management plan, the stakeholder register, and of course, enterprise environmental factors and organizational process assets.

The tools and techniques for this process is expert judgment meetings. You’re going to meet with stakeholders and analytical techniques. And remember, analytical techniques with stakeholder management means we’re seeing the project from the stakeholders perspectives, the outputs, the stakeholder management plan and project documents updates. Let’s take a look at what exactly planning stakeholder management means. Well, we would use expert judgment for stakeholder management planning. So we think about these are some really common stakeholders and think about each one of these and how their perspective of the project is going to vary from one role to another.

So senior management, your project team members are stakeholders. Organizational resources like people in It or procurement identified key stakeholders, people that are affected by your project and need to contribute to your project. The project manager is a stakeholder subject matter experts like consultants and contractors. And then you may have to deal with some regulatory bodies and nongovernmental agencies in your industry and those would be neutral stakeholders.

4. Keeping stakeholder engagement

A mistake I see many project managers make is early in the project. They engage stakeholders and ask questions and get stakeholders excited about the project. And then that relationship just begins to fade and drift away. What needs to happen is, is an Iterative process to maintain that stakeholder engagement, to keep stakeholders engaged in the project. So we want stakeholders to be excited about the project, but we also have to work to obtain and confirm and maintain that commitment and that excitement. Now, as a project manager, we have to manage stakeholder expectations. And this means that we communicate exactly what the project is going to accomplish. We don’t want to make promises to stakeholders that we can’t keep. So oftentimes stakeholders will say, well, when will this be done? It sounds great.

And the project manager gives a quick estimate of when it can be done and that’s the date the stakeholders are going to remember. So managing stakeholder expectations is not only for the schedule, but for time and cost and scope what the project can actually deliver. As we’re moving to the project, because this is an Iterative process, we need to go to problems when they exist. We address concerns and potential concerns. We also want to work to clarify and resolve issues. Stakeholders sometimes hear rumors and they feel threatened. And so we want to work with them to resolve those issues and to make sure they have a clear ongoing understanding of what this project is going to accomplish. Now, this process of managing stakeholder engagement requires a stakeholder management plan. It’s coupled closely with the communications management plan.

You may have to get involved with the change log because change log can affect stakeholders. You have a change that enters the project and then organizational process, assets, tools and techniques, communication methods, interpersonal skills and management skills. Outputs of this process will be the issue log, change request, project management plan updates, project document updates, and organizational process assets updates. So how do you go about engaging stakeholders? Well, it’s pretty obvious. You have to talk with stakeholders, so you have to rely on some communication methods. And so you think about what needs to be communicated, who needs to receive it, the modality, the timing, so the communication methods.

We’re going to find that information in our communications management plan. Interpersonal skills require that you take steps to build trust, to resolve conflict, to really understand what stakeholders are saying. And then we work with stakeholders to overcome resistance to change. We want them to buy in to what the project’s going to accomplish. Now, some management skills facilitate consensus among stakeholders, influence people negotiations, and then right out of the pinbach, modify organizational behavior to accept the project outcomes. I think that’s a pretty funny sentence. You might as well say lower your expectations to be more in alignment with what you are experiencing. So in other words, we’re telling people, hey, this is what’s going to happen. As a result of the project.

5. Controlling stakeholders

Closely associated with managing stakeholder engagement is controlling stakeholder engagement. To control stakeholder engagement means that we monitor what’s our overall stakeholder relationships. We adjust our stakeholder management strategies, we update the stakeholder management plan as needed. And this approach helps to better create relationships with our stakeholders that we just don’t view them as a customers or as a pain in the neck, that we take an approach that will help customers feel like they have a sense of ownership and buy in. And really it makes our life easier as a project manager when stakeholders believe in the work that we’re doing and they understand the approach that we’re taking as a project manager.

This is a project management process that happens throughout the project. We’ll rely on the project management plan, the issue log, work performance data and project documents, tools and techniques will be things like the information management system, expert judgment in meetings. Now, this process creates work performance information you may have change request project management plan updates, project document updates, and organizational process assets updates. To actively engage stakeholders is really our goal as a project manager. So we need to rely on accurate and reliable information.

So that’s where that information management system comes from. And this is a system that is a way to collect and organize and allow us to quickly retrieve information. To communicate with stakeholders, we’ll have to use expert judgment. And yes, you’ll need to meet with stakeholders. And then we’ll also want to be honest and direct with project news that we don’t hide bad news from people. There’s nothing worse as a customer to find out bad news late and we feel like we’ve been lied to or someone hasn’t been honest with us. So it’s better to just give bad news when it’s there. Now, the caveat to that is never go to a stakeholder or management with a problem unless we can also go with a solution. You.

6. Section wrap

This is a new knowledge area on stakeholder management. So in this session, we talked about planning stakeholder management. So planning stakeholder management defines how will you identify stakeholders, how will you manage that engagement and then how will you keep stakeholders involved and how will you as you move closer and closer to the end, you’re going to be communicating with stakeholders there’s about the project coming to a close. So it’s a really important knowledge area. It’s a new knowledge area in this version of the Pinbox. So if you’re not familiar with this knowledge area, you’ve not seen it before. I really encourage you to embrace the terms, embrace the philosophies of stakeholder management.

Perhaps go back and watch this session again. I guarantee, because this is a new topic in the Pinbach fifth edition, you’re going to have a lot of questions on your exam that are relevant to stakeholder management. Stakeholder management will also be relevant to communications management. So if you have a good grasp on project communications, it should be easy to make that relation to stakeholder management. But keep going. Don’t let that scare you. Just use that to your advantage. Thanks you so much. You’ve completed the session on stakeholder management.