When managing a project, it is vital to keep all participants up to date on what is going on - especially the stakeholders. Keeping the stakeholders informed is an oft-neglected but vital part of running a successful project. There are many ways to inform stakeholders - from using collaborative software that informs clients of the project status, to creating status reports, to having daily or weekly meetings. Below you will find some tips on how you can keep project stakeholders up to date on what's going on - without sacrificing productivity.
The most important item to have in place when thinking about facilitating stakeholder management is a communication plan. By creating an effective plan, you and your team members will know when and how to inform each participating stakeholder. Typical items included in a communication plan are:
- Background of the project
- Stakeholder Analysis
- Clearly-Stated objectives
- The strategy for communicating with stakeholders (When, What Means, Why, Who)
- Potential risks involved with communication (i.e. what happens if someone is not reachable?)
- The budget for communications
Although it might seem like a lot of work to put together a communication plan for your project (after all, you did create a project plan, right?), it is a vitally important step if you want to keep stakeholders informed. By designating who the stakeholders are, what the objectives for communication are, and the strategy for communication, you save yourself heartache and trouble in the long-run. If something goes wrong, do you really want five team members scrambling to figure out who needs to be contacted first?
One of the easiest ways to make sure that you keep up to date on the status of tasks, issues, and milestone completion is to use a collaborative project management software that produces reports. Many software programs are available for this purpose.
Even if you find a program that does not send reports automatically to your stakeholders, using project management software is a great boon to keeping stakeholders informed. Much software includes tasks that are allocated to resources. When a resource completes a task, it appears as such in the project manager's version of the software. If an issue comes up, it can be discussed in a forum or in a special issues-tracking area of the program.
By making your software work hard to collect project data, reporting the data is much easier (and thus, communicating this information with stakeholders is easier because you don't have to hunt down who has done what.)
On the next page, we'll look at some other tools that can be used to help keep project stakeholders informed.