Project Stakeholder Management

Book excerpt: Carrying out a project as planned is not a guarantee for success. Projects may fail because project management does not take the requirements, wishes and concerns of stakeholders sufficiently into account. Projects can only be successful through contributions from stakeholders. And it is the stakeholders that evaluate whether they find the project successful - an evaluation based on criteria that go beyond receiving the project deliverables. More often than not, the criteria are implicit and change during the project course. This is an enormous challenge for project managers. The route to better projects, say Pernille Eskerod and Anna Lund Jepsen, lies in finding ways to improve project stakeholder management. To manage stakeholders effectively, you need to know your stakeholders, their behaviours and attitudes towards the project. The authors give guidance on how to adopt an analytical and structured approach; how to document, store and retrieve your knowledge; how to plan your stakeholder interactions in advance; and how to make your plans explicit, at the very least internally. A well-conceived plan can prevent you from being carried away in the ’heat of the moment’ and help you spend your limited resources for stakeholder management in the best way. To make this plan, you need to agree on the objectives of your stakeholder strategy and ways to achieve them. Project Stakeholder Management offers tactics and tools founded on established marketing communications theory as well as strategic management for doing just that. This book is part of Gower’s Fundamentals of Project Management Series.