Topic 1 What is Stakeholder and Stakeholder management
Stakeholders: Those people or groups who are (intentionally or unintentionally) affected by or who can affect the activities of your organization / your activities.
Key stakeholders: Those stakeholders who are most important to the success of your organization.
Stakeholder analysis help to:
- Set long, medium and short term goals
- Define priorities and action plans
- Adapt to unforeseen changes
By involving your stakeholders in the appropriate way – by ensuring that they are engaged with your work – you will improve the likelihood of sustaining a service improvement project.
Working with stakeholders and engaging them in the business process is important at all stages of any project. However, there are some key stages were engaging stakeholder is more crucial than in others:
- Before you launch the project it is wise to get yourself a supportive (as much as possible) circle of stakeholders. Active communication about your plans from the very beginning will give them a feeling of participation and importance, thus gaining you a favourable stakeholders attitude towards you and your project. Yet you have to be careful to learn about each of your stakeholders and understand their current position towards your project.
- Agreeing on the work at different stages will help you to understand how committed (or resistant) to your project different stakeholders are and evaluate how likely they are to carry out the actions agreed and what (or who!) may stand in their way.
- At the end of the project ensure that all that your stakeholders are aware of the changes that have been put in place and the lessons that have been learnt.