How to work with multiple stakeholders?
Let’s start with basics — who are stakeholders?
When I first talked to my wife about this term, she thought that stakeholders are people who hold any share, stocks or securities. However, the term is much wider.
A stakeholder is someone who can affect or has interest in an organization, a business or a project. Those can be divided into internal and external stakeholders.
Internal stakeholders are:
- Team members or other employees of a company,
- Management of a company,
- People who own a company,
- Shareholders.
External stakeholders are:
- Suppliers,
- Contractors,
- Government agencies,
- Customers,
- Creditors.
Process
Here are 10 tips how you can build your process of working with multiple stakeholders on a project:
#1 Identify & organize. Get to know the strategic goals of the organization you make the project for. Then make a list of tasks and projects you are responsible for. Finally, combine those two lists to identify what stakeholders are best positioned to help you achieve your goals.
#2 Get to know your stakeholders in advance. Categorize and characterize stakeholders by:
- Primary, secondary and key stakeholders,
- Internal and external,
- Time that they have to communicate with you - this includes both frequency and schedule,
- Channels of communication that are familiar to them,
- What information do they require.
#3 Get to know their motives. Discover what ambitions do they have about the project or how will they benefit from the success of it. Try to ask yourself questions like:
- Are they aware of the problem that the project is solving?
- Are they motivated to find a good solution for the problem?
#4 Adapt. Don’t try to implement the same approach of communication to all stakeholders. Use the information you gathered about their free time and channels of communication to build the connection that will work with each different stakeholder. You don’t necessarily have to share the same information with all stakeholders as they all may have different needs.
#5 Provide value. Make sure that each interaction with a stakeholder is valuable to them. Don’t overload them with information. This may lead to their distancing from a project. At the same time, don’t make them starve with information — this usually leads to the state when they become too worried about a project or vice versa — not aware of problems they may help with.
#6 Set schedule. Make sure you communicate with stakeholders on consistent basis. But think about the frequency of communication differently for each stakeholder. For example, external stakeholders usually require less frequent interactions than the internal ones.
#7 Set deadlines. Each time you communicate, and as a result of your communication you ask your stakeholder to provide you an answer or some materials — set deadlines. This will help people you communicate with plan their time to answer you. But leave some space for them to be late as it happens sometimes, and you don’t want it to be crucial for your work — communicate the deadlines a bit stricter than you really need to. It is especially important when communicating with multiple stakeholders as their number make risks of being late higher.
#8 Seek for feedback. Try to keep track of how stakeholders react when you communicate with them. Adjust your processes so that they start to feel happy about how things go.
#9 Meet one-to-one. Even though there is a temptation to bring all stakeholders together in one room or Zoom conference to solve all the problems, it is not always the best way to manage stakeholders. Meeting one-on-one builds stronger connection and makes a person feel more valuable which can lead to more precise information they can provide you.
#10 Escalate. Get to know to whom you should escalate a problem if you can’t solve it. Agree on that escalation process with all stakeholders so that it will not be a surprise for them if you go to their boss. Build your escalation on facts and objective things.
Conflicts
It happens that stakeholders on the project can disagree on some level what should be developed or how. To solve or even prevent this situation business analyst can do those 5 things:
#1 Communicate one-on-one first. While bringing arguing stakeholders together can make things worse, try to extract as much information and opinion as you can on one-on-one sessions with different stakeholders. This will help you get more objective information on what solution can make all the sides be satisfied. Bringing everybody together, on the other hand, can move the conversation from objective to emotional where the needed information is harder to obtain.
#2 Mission of the organization. Remember the mission and goals of the company when building a proposal for stakeholders with different opinions. Remind them of that mission when presenting the solution. Build your arguments on that mission. Put the needs of the business first.
#3 Make it a problem-solving exercise. If you already on a meeting where stakeholders argue. Then gain clarity first by asking open questions. Refer to the company’s mission. Remind that we are all here to achieve the mission.
#4 Appreciate stakeholder’s positions. Always make sure each stakeholder doesn’t feel like you neglect their position in any way. Refer to the company’s mission.
#5 Ask, not convince. It is easy to say without options that something will be done in particular way. However, having multiple stakeholders can lead some of them to disagree with you. It is tempting to leave this tension as it is but much better to make them believe you. The best way to do it is to ask the person who disagree questions that will show your perspective. For example, questions considering reputation and long-term goals of the organization. Use the “five whys” technique.
To conclude, working with multiple stakeholders is definitely harder than with only one. However, this always leads to better products. Isn’t that what we are here for?
