Speaker 1: Do you need a better understanding of stakeholder management? By the end of this video, you'll know exactly what is stakeholder management and the steps that you need to take in order to manage your stakeholders. And if you want to be a project manager rock star, then stay tuned to the end of this video where I'm going to share with you how you can get your hands on an amazing checklist which is going to ensure that your projects succeed. Hi, if you're new here, welcome. Subscribe to the Best Career and Project Management Advice channel coming to you with a new video every Wednesday. Now, if you're excited about learning about stakeholder management, then give this video a like and let's get to it. What is a stakeholder? Let's ensure we're all on the same page with this definition. A stakeholder is anyone who has interest in your project. That interest ranges from a sponsor who is giving you the directive for the project and who's a champion for it, to steering committee members who are going to help you remove roadblocks, to your actual team members who are the subject matter experts who are executing tasks, and to the person who's delivering, sorry, who's actually going to receive the deliverable of the project. So stakeholders are anyone who has an interest in the project. What is stakeholder management? When it comes to project, your stakeholders can make or break what is going on in your project from a standpoint of perception to the actual reality of what's going on. So stakeholder management is really about ensuring that you have proper communication and an understanding of needs. This is where change management comes in because you really look at stakeholders under the umbrella of change management. The success of your project is not just about ensuring that you hit your deliverable, but ensuring that you brought all your stakeholders along the process and journey of the creation of your deliverable. So by the time it's done, everyone's on the same page and they're all excited. So it really is about managing the people who are all going to be different and have different needs and ensuring that everyone is on that same page. Now I'm going to go through with you the step-by-step guide on managing stakeholders. So step one, identify your stakeholders. This is a really interesting activity. One tool that I use all the time and I highly recommend is a SIPOC. In fact, if you go to the link below underneath this YouTube video, you'll actually see one of my videos that I talk about SIPOC. You really want to have an understanding of who's involved. Now a nice way to look at it is it could be internal or external stakeholders. So the internal stakeholders are kind of the people that I mentioned before when I talked about stakeholders. They're your project, your sponsors, your steering committee, they're people within your organization that are impacted by this project. But there's external stakeholders as well. And you really have to look at that depending on what you're delivering. You may have a third party vendor, you may be delivering something to an outside consumer or to a customer. You may even have to think about government regulations. They become a stakeholder in your process. So identifying who all your stakeholders are is going to be critical because each one you're going to address and communicate with in a different manner because they all have different needs. Step two, understanding your stakeholders. This is where you want to have an understanding of needs and interest in the project because depending on their need and interest, you're going to address them in different ways. So you want to find out from your internal and or external stakeholders whether or not they have lots of needs and lots of interest or do they have minimal needs and lots of interest or do they have lots of interest and minimal needs. You know where I'm going, right? It's like a graph that you're going to do and you're going to place them into which section or quadrant that they're in because that's going to determine your type of communication you're going to have with them. I'm not going to over communicate with someone who has low interest in the project and low needs. I'm going to provide communication, but I'm not going to do extensive communication. But for someone that has lots of interest and lots of needs, I'm going to be on top of that particular stakeholder a lot to make sure they're very much aware of what's going on. So it really determines their needs and interests, how much activity and action you're going to have with a particular stakeholder. Step three, put an engagement plan together for each of your stakeholders based on step two in that graph I told you about and their interest level needs. So now that you know where they are, lots of interest, lots of needs, put a real detailed plan around that because you're going to have to integrate that into your project plan. Step four, allocate time to interact with your stakeholders. Yes, I know you know where each one is at in the quadrant. You've identified them. You even have your engagement plan. That's awesome. The hustle and bustle of projects, however, you definitely need to ensure you don't get lost in that hustle and bustle and just stick to your engagement plan, which could just very well be emails and newsletters or whatever it may be. I highly recommend you actually incorporate some one-on-one time and really speak to them and get them involved. So just ensure that you do allocate that time with them as part of your engagement plan, which is just going to ensure that you successfully address their needs and ensure that their interest is also at the same level that it started with at the beginning of the project too. Now that you know how to manage your stakeholders, congratulations, I would like for you to go to the link below and grab this. This is going to ensure that you can manage your projects with great success and minimize failures, just as important as it is with stakeholder management. So please check it out. On that note, I want to thank you so much for watching this video. Please like it. Share it with everybody that you know, and if you have any other tips, tricks, techniques on managing stakeholders, please share them in the comments below. Until the next video, see you later.