Onboard the Stakeholder

Being on couple of projects of different complexities in last one year or so, and going through various tricky situations, it stuck me  that how less emphasis we give on a fact when a new stakeholder joins the project. Not to get into the definition of what a stakeholder is, reference here is towards a stakeholder who is also a customer.

Projects, which are small in nature, generally have a happy go lucky feeling much on the lines of having a small circle of friends or a tiny community of like minded people. Communication is easier in this small group as no. of stakeholders are less and so the chances of having varied expectations from a project or the people.

Life on a large project is quite different though. By the way, the problem in question here is not a problem of scale. But, it is something to do with complexity of client organization and various stakeholders in there at different levels. Various projects have seen pain, mainly for the reason that some new influential stakeholder has joined the project in some capacity and have a different idea about running the project for what so ever the reason may be. 

Various project management books and experts talks about doing stakeholder identification, need analysis and then continuous management. What doesn't come out very well is the fact that these stakeholders need proper attention in first bringing them on board with state of affairs on variety of things. There are bunch of things, which needs to be established from the outset. 

List of things to-do includes:

• Alignment on philosophy of two organizations i.e. customer and vendor
• Delivery Models
• Who is who
• Communication model in place
• Expectation Setting
• Setting up the path to fluid communication

Method of doing this on-boarding could differ but goal should be same i.e. to bring the stakeholder on the same page about state of affairs on the project. On the other hand, it could be a great opportunity for a project team to know of some concerns in advance and proactively manage them. My preference is to do one or multiple face-to-face discussion with the stakeholder in an appropriate setting. My preferred environment is to invite the person to the place where the project team works from. It simply builds perspective to the entire discussion.

There could be more to this list above but it may play a vital role in not only managing the stakeholder but also can define success or failure of a project.