Prevent Pseudo-Stakeholders from Hurting Your Project
People who think they’re stakeholders but aren’t waste your time and distract your project team. Early on, you need to address these pseudo-stakeholders, so they don’t eat up your time and resources. This Project Pointer provides approaches to identify them and reduce their impact on your project.
- Hold public consultations. After meeting with identified stakeholders, it’s time to hold open-to-the-public meetings to discuss the project’s scope and objectives. People who think they have something to lose or gain from the project can share their thoughts and concerns at this meeting. By addressing these concerns early, you save time later on (from minimizing distractions from pseudo-stakeholders) that more than makes up for the time it takes to plan and deliver a public consultation session.
- Draft out-of-scope statements. Project charters typically focus on defining scope. An underused aspect of project charters is identifying what is out of scope. By clearly defining what is and is not in scope, you can help prevent pseudo-stakeholders from delaying the project with needless debates.
- Build a deliverables map. This is a visual representation of the deliverables produced in a project, showing the prerequisite deliverables that must be completed to produce the project’s final deliverables. This comprehensive overview of every item the project will produce can highlight the areas of the organization that will and won’t be affected by project deliverables—and from that, you can demonstrate who actual stakeholders are. Anyone else is a pseudo-stakeholder.
- Focus on organizational politics. Be aware of internal politics, power struggles, or turf wars that might lead individuals to think they are stakeholders. You can proactively address people’s concerns when you understand who challenges scope statements or demands more for their business area. Politics will alert you to managers (beyond your project sponsor) who you need to work with to prevent pseudo-stakeholder objections.
Try these approaches with your current project to see if you have pseudo-stakeholders dragging your project down. If you do, it’s time to address them politely, firmly, and with your reasoning.
For more about stakeholders, check out Natasha Kasimtseva’s Managing Project Stakeholders course.
______________________________________
This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 69,000 subscribers. This newsletter is 100% written by a human (no aliens or AIs involved). If you like this article, you can subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.
Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library and tune into my LinkedIn Office Hours live broadcasts.