An awful lot of people do not think that they know what stakeholder management is. Yet, it is something many people are involved in on an almost daily basis, without realising it.
Most people are involved in delivering long-term projects as part of their day-to-day workload. For example in food retail plans for Christmas will begin to be made as early as January. To a retailer Christmas is a huge project and products for the next Christmas have to be sourced and bought long in advance. Additional resources such as extra warehousing, lorries and personnel all have to be planned out and sourced.
Each person involved in this project is effectively a stakeholder. They are someone that has to do a specific list of things to a prescribed timetable, for a pre agreed price, in order for the project to be delivered.
Not communicating exactly what their role is and what timescales each stakeholder is working to is a recipe for disaster. As well as telling everyone what he or she has to do you also need to keep track of whether they have agreed to do it. When it gets closer to the time, you also need to check if they are actually delivering on their commitments. If they are not you, need to make other arrangements to keep the entire project on track.
Tools to Help with Stakeholder Management
The responsibility involved in stakeholder management is huge and keeping track of the hundreds of people involved and their progress on tasks is essential. The bigger the project is the more important this is. Luckily, there are modern data management tools available that can help with this.
Clearly when it comes to stakeholder management, you cannot afford to take risks. Therefore, it is important to only use the best data tools available. The best place to buy them from are firms who are themselves experienced at managing large amounts of data. Their expertise has allowed them to develop stakeholder management software and tools that really work. Using a well-established and experienced firm means that you will get the support you need in the early days to learn how to use the software they sell you.
Smart QBase is the place to go for software and data tools to help you with successful stakeholder management.