Tips for Supporting Stakeholder Needs

Producing a useful product is one aspect of successful project delivery. Considering the thoughts and feelings of stakeholders is just as important because it helps prepare stakeholders for accepting and using your deliverables. Here are four recommendations to help you support your stakeholders’ needs.

• Find which business areas your project affects. Include specific tasks to research the tools, processes, strengths, and weaknesses of each stakeholder area. If you have access to business analysts, this is a great first assignment for them to tackle. If you don’t, the project manager should conduct stakeholder interviews to collect this information. What you learn helps your project plan accommodate your stakeholders’ realities and prevent surprises during project implementation. You certainly don’t want your solution to make your stakeholders’ weaknesses worse.
• Plan early exposure to the solution. You can generate ownership of the solution by letting stakeholders see early versions of your products. Encourage them to share feedback. They will be more confident when they take part in creating project outcomes. What does seeing a solution mean? Showing stakeholders anything that is an early view of an upcoming product or service: prototypes, business processes shown with sticky notes, early versions of IT user interface screens, or IT testing or design diagrams. Many project managers delay these activities because the solution may change. But that’s the whole idea of early exposure! Your stakeholder perspectives can be incorporated into your products to deploy positive changes. So, show the product early, even earlier than you’re comfortable with. You’ll increase stakeholder buy-in.
• Identify business processes before committing to new tool deliverables. A risky way to run a project is to come up with what looks like a useful tool to build to help your business and move forward with a project to implement it. HOW and WHERE that tool could be used in your business should be analyzed first. Develop to-be business processes to figure out how your business could incorporate a new tool. Use those new processes to show stakeholders how the tool could create better outcomes. In short, if you want buy-in from stakeholders, create to-be processes first. Then you can start a new project to deploy the tool.
• Let stakeholders drive project definition and organizational change. There are stories about the placement of new campus sidewalks. As the story goes, buildings were constructed and opened, and sidewalks were laid on the worn paths created by the campus’ occupants. This was better than laying sidewalks where designers THOUGHT people would walk. This is an excellent example of letting stakeholders drive change. Project teams are often guilty of thinking they know what stakeholders want. And they design projects according to that vision – often to catastrophic results. Letting stakeholders drive projects can build enthusiasm and help focus on what that stakeholders want changed or improved.

What other steps can you take to account for what stakeholders really want? Share your thoughts, questions, and anecdotes in the comments section.

For more about working with stakeholders, check out Natasha Kasimtseva’s Managing Project Stakeholders course.

Coming Up

• Join Tiffany Uman and me on Wednesday, Oct 25, 2023 1:00pm MDT for our live broadcast “How to Provide Project Updates to Executives “. Your leadership team is not out to get you. That said, communicating with them effectively is essential, especially when providing pertinent project updates to drive the business forward. In this live Office Hours, Tiffany Uman and I will dive into the key DOs and DON’Ts for presenting updates to your leadership team with confidence and getting the buy-in you need. I’m excited to hear her advice about communicating project information to executives. Post your questions in the event comments or bring them to the live event!

Tiffany is a career coach, workplace expert, and fellow LinkedIn Learning instructor. Check out her course,  Nano Tips for Answering Common Interview Questions with Tiffany Uman.

• My updated Advanced Microsoft Project has been published to the LinkedIn Learning library. This update is completely rerecorded with a new, comprehensive sample project. It is half as long as the previous edition because I took out all the topics I cover in my other Project courses. My humble opinion is that it is also more engaging, because of everything I’ve learned about recording videos in the past 8 years! Here is a link that lets you watch the course for free for the first 24 hours after you begin watching. https://www.linkedin.com/learning-login/share?account=2125562&forceAccount=false&redirect=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.linkedin.com%2Flearning%2Fadvanced-microsoft-project-22898395%3Ftrk%3Dshare_ent_url%26shareId%3DY6Ij%252BD6QSpybAA2hvHxhlQ%253D%253D

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This article belongs to the Bonnie’s Project Pointers newsletter series, which has more than 51,000 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.

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