Speaker 1: The success of your project isn't just about Gantt charts, timelines, and action plans. It's about people because that's where the magic happens. And in this video, we're going to talk about stakeholder engagement so you know how to do that type of magic. What is a stakeholder? This is something that we all need to be very much aware of. A stakeholder is anyone who has a stake in the project. So anyone has an interest in it, whether that is something that is more in-depth and involved or whether it's just something on the peripheral sidelines. So who are some of these stakeholders? These could be anyone from senior executives. It could be your sponsor. It could be your direct manager, your team members. It could be the end user who's receiving the deliverable. It could be a department who's part of that deliverable. Again, anyone who touches the project. The thing with stakeholders though is not all stakeholders are treated equally depending on who they are and their involvement in the project. But as long as you understand that a stakeholder is anyone who touches the project, then you need to take a look at all those stakeholders because every single one of them has something special and unique that you need to take a look at to make that magic happen. Okay, before we get into stakeholder engagement tips that I have for you, I also have this. This is really important. So just as important it is to know about stakeholders, understanding what is going to stop your project from success. Those failures are really critical too and this is for you. It's a free download that I created based on my experience and the link is under this video. Confirm the vision. Your stakeholders need to be locked into your project and the best way to do that is they need to understand really what the vision is of your project. Now every stakeholder is a little bit different in regards to what you're going to talk to them about that vision. For senior people, sponsors, your steering committee, they need to have an understanding of the high-level vision of the project and how it ties into the strategy because that's what they're focusing on. Your team members who are stakeholders, they need to have a lot more detail of the vision. So you want to not only know where the vision is of where you're going to go, why it's happening, that's why you have some of those project documentation so they get into the nitty-gritty details because they need all of that information in order to ensure that they're developing and executing on the right stuff to achieve what it is that you're looking to achieve. Now your other stakeholders which may be more on the peripheral sidelines, which could be the end result department, it could be maybe an offshoot manager, they don't need super detail but they should have an idea and understanding as to what is the vision of the project and how it's going to impact them. So this is where communication becomes really important and how you communicate to each one will be slightly different depending on the documentation but communicating that vision, giving them the why and how it's going to impact them is really critical for stakeholder management, engagement, and really the magic. Make communication easy. We already know that every stakeholder needs to have different types of information and your communication actually to them needs to be in different forms as well with a different tone. So some of the things to make communication easy is you really want to be aware of everything that's happening around you. As a project manager you are you have your finger on the pulse but what I do is a little tip and trick I want to share with you is I actually keep a little notebook on the side and if you don't want to do a notebook you can do it on your phone on a note or you can do it on a note on your computer but as things are progressing you want to make note of stuff. Some successes, something funny that's happened, you want to kind of collect things as they're occurring. Why? Because to make communication easy for everyone you have to have multiple forms of communication. One of the first things I always recommend is have a project newsletter. This is not about status but this is more high level stuff that you're going to give to everybody and it's really going to be interesting for all stakeholders on kind of what's happening. Maybe there's some notices, maybe there's something that cool that occurred, maybe there's an upcoming event. Just generally speaking a high level newsletter to say where your project's at. The second type of communication you're going to want to have is like your project reporting. So that's your status reporting that's really more for really those who are your subject matter experts on your project team and for your senior executives. That's really detailed communication and the last type of communication you want to consider depending on your organization is some sort of communication posts. Some organizations use social media channels internally even externally depending on what it is and who your stakeholders are. You can do that as well to kind of give the guidance of what's happening. You can even make things a little bit fun. We've had with project themes where we've had our mascots, excuse me, where we had some of these here where they've actually gone for trips and we've taken pictures and posted them which has been a lot of fun from a communication standpoint for those stakeholders. Discuss assumptions early on. Let's just be clear. Things don't have assumptions. People have assumptions and that's a huge aspect in projects where things can get derailed or there just can be issues with your stakeholders if you don't really highlight those assumptions. Now every stakeholder needs to be spoken to about what those assumptions are and you need to document those assumptions because if you don't, people will assume that something's supposed to happen when you know it's not supposed to happen. So you want to get clarity on that. That is just a really great way to keep engagement from the beginning all the way to the end of the project true to what you are delivering. Otherwise someone's going to assume something, you're not doing it, they get upset and now you're doing a lot more work trying to do damage control. Why? Because you didn't talk about assumptions. It's a very simple thing to do and it could be very simply having a meeting and say okay let's put on the table what we think some of the assumptions are. Even if you think everybody knows what the assumption is, write it down. I'm always surprised. There's always something out there that you're like what? You're really thinking we're going to do that and then you just get it cleared up. That's so important for communication with your stakeholders and ensuring that everything's on track. Before we get into the rest of the tips, I just want to let you know that not only do I have this free content here on YouTube, I have this. If you want to go to the next step with me and you want to learn more at a premium level, you can enroll in S.L.A.Y. Project Management. It's the exact process I use for all my clients including all the tools you'll need. I put the link in the description box below. Address issues proactively. All right we're talking about our stakeholders, different types of them, again we're talking about people and it's really important that if issues are popping up we don't ignore them no matter who they are. There are ways to go about addressing these issues in a very proactive manner and it's simply to take a look at things for what is the issue, what is it stopping, or what is it creating from a standpoint of impacting on your project deliverable and then finding solutions to resolve it. This is a skill set as a project manager that is going to take you far because you need to do this with all types of stakeholders and you just want to make sure that you do not become an ostrich with your head in the sand hoping that those issues are going to go away. You got to step up to the plate, you got to be the leader, and you have to address those issues no matter how uncomfortable it is. It's just going to really improve your stakeholder engagement. AARs are a must. AAR is an after-action review and this can happen throughout the life cycle of your project. It can happen after a stage, it can happen after a milestone, it can happen after a major event, it can even happen with an issue, but your after-action review is really important because it's reviewing everything. You want to make sure that your stakeholders are heard so you bring them together whoever those are for that particular item that you're now reviewing and you want to say okay what is it that we need to take a look at, how do we get better, do you have any issues and concerns, and so that becomes really important. People want to feel heard and if you give the opportunity in a very structured format through an AAR to do that then they'll be more apt to bring up more ideas and suggestions. Again that's that whole stakeholder engagement. Celebrate successes big and small. This is important for stakeholder engagement. Your stakeholders want to know they're doing a good job. They just want to be acknowledged for the work that they're doing and so when I talk about celebration I don't mean a big party. I mean you could do a big party but I'm talking about even simple things like giving them a thank you note, acknowledging them in a meeting with a team, you know having maybe going out for lunch with everybody to say oh my god we just finished this big milestone awesome let's go out and celebrate but it's the acknowledgement of all the hard work that everybody is doing. I have not come across anybody on a project team that purposefully is not doing work. Everyone does their work in their way particularly when you're really good at bringing everyone collectively as a team and so celebrating those successes, completion of a milestone, great job, well done, whether it's in the group or individually it's just really important from an engagement perspective. Okay you were really good at the engagement now. Now you even have to get better at understanding what's going to keep your project from succeeding. I created this for you based on experience. It is free for you. Where do you get it? Link is underneath this video. Okay you just understand some stakeholder engagement. You need to watch this next video. It's going to be really important and tie off this topic but on that note if you can like this video, if you can subscribe to this channel, become part of this amazing community, also leave a comment below. It helps us to know that we're giving you what you're looking for but on that note I'll see you at the next video.