Dealing with wanna-be stakeholders

Wanna-be stakeholders are secondary or out of scope stakeholders who are trying to push their way into your project to get their concerns addressed. They can generate scope creep, drag out decision making and stall your project.

Here’s how to deal with wanna-be stakeholders.

• Define out of scope items by business area. That way you can uninvite wanna-be stakeholders from your meetings. This allows you to focus on items the project is intended to serve, making it easier to manage. You can take requests from the wanna-be stakeholders for a future phase of the project.
• Designate business area representatives. Stakeholders within a business area may propose different requirements. This can create conflict and confusion within your project. Designated representatives from each business area are responsible for aligning requirements before conflicts reach your project team.
• Define observer only meeting attendees. Excluding interested stakeholders from meetings can violate transparency norms. With observer only attendees (people who can listen, but not comment or ask questions), you can keep project discussions focused, efficient and transparent.
• Distribute project newsletters. Frequent status updates to your broader stakeholder set is often all that’s needed to satisfy wanna-be stakeholders. While you may get questions to answer, that takes less time than defending your project from challenges presented due to a lack of information.

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For more on managing stakeholders, watch the Analyze Stakeholders movie in my Project Management Foundations course.