Stakeholder management

- Pat the PM and Bailey the BA are working on their CRM project and they know that stakeholder management will be a big factor in their success. They're especially concerned about the project due to the stakeholder being extremely busy and not having time for the project. Yet this project is looking to change a lot about what these stakeholder groups do. Our stakeholders have full-time jobs and the project is usually a side job for them. Imagine having your full-time job and in addition, getting several meeting requests per day from a project team. These other meetings take a lower priority and can easily add stress to your day, right? Well, for each stakeholder, the project is one entity. So it can look overwhelming to get so many meeting invites from the team. It can look like the project team isn't coordinated in using their time well. Managing stakeholders is a shared responsibility between the PM and the BA on the project. So what does successful PM and BA collaboration look like in the area of stakeholder management? It means regular touch bases to discuss which stakeholders you're meeting with and what the agenda is with them. At times, this entails combining meetings when both are meeting with the same person in the same timeframe. Collaborating together on these meetings involves working together to empathize with where stakeholder is at and creating shared key messages when meeting with them. What does this create? It creates a shared front in the eyes of a stakeholder, who may need to see this partnership to trust what you're doing and feel comfortable contributing. Some tactical things Pat and Bailey discussed about stakeholders together are things like the role of each stakeholder and expectations, who influences the stakeholder and who do they influence, and what's going on in their area that may connect with the project or cause project stress, What is the stakeholder's current mindset about the project and the time they're investing with the team? Pat and Bailey have found that all of this helps build better relationships, trust, and engagement. It also helped them bring stakeholders in as stakeholders could now see the value of their time and how it would be used. Pat and Bailey's stakeholder before struggled to see how their time with the project team would be useful to their full-time jobs. Now they see how working with the team helps them in other areas, as well, and Pat and Bailey are also very sensitive to ensure the time is used well to maximize this. Pat and Bailey do this by helping their stakeholders see, and imagine the future, which impacts everything they work on.