You’ve probably heard that stakeholders are the necessary ingredient for any project’s success. So who exactly are your stakeholders and why are they so important to your project?
In a general sense, a stakeholder is anyone that has a stake in the project. When examined more specifically, a primary stakeholder is anyone who directly benefits or is affected by a certain business activity. This could be a product or a change to a service agreement. Primary stakeholders include employees, investors, company owners, creditors and suppliers, among many others. Secondary stakeholders are individuals that have a more secondary stake in what’s happening in the project. These can be members of the public or families. For example, for an organization that makes lighting systems for residential customers, the primary stakeholders would be the customers that actually received a product, the lighting systems. But you’d also have employees that helped to make the product. You would have vendors that buy the product and sell the products to the customers. You’d also have the stockholders for the company.
In order to improve your processes and products with Six Sigma, you need to identify your stakeholders. This can be done using brainstorming sessions. For example, with your project sponsor or your team. When you brainstorm with your team, there are several key questions that you should ask and consider together. These questions include, who would be impacted? Who would provide the inputs? Who would use the inputs? Who might hamper the progress? And who uses the process? These questions will help you identify who should be included in the list of stakeholders for your project.
Stakeholder management is critical to the success of a project. If stakeholders are not supportive or they are against the project, their impact can be extremely detrimental to the success of the project. There are times when a stakeholder may even want to impede the progress of a project, potentially because there is competing interest and a lack of time to focus on the specific project.
There are two factors to consider about every stakeholder. The first is their level of interest in the project and its outcome. The second is the potential impact or power they can have over the outcomes. You need to understand the goal of stakeholder management. It’s to get reluctant or potentially hostile stakeholders on the side of the project, to the point where they are positive about the project. You also want to get un-interested stakeholders enthused and actively supporting the project.
There are a couple of tools you can use to help manage stakeholders. The first tool is the stakeholder register, which is used to identify and manage stakeholders. The table that’s used for stakeholder register shows the overall attitude of the key stakeholders and their impact on the project. It can also include some other useful information on the stakeholders. In addition to their name, it also typically includes their role, their attitude toward process improvement and their potential impact. Other information that can be included is their contact information, any communications requirements that might help change their attitude toward the projects and the expectations that they would have on these projects as well.
Another useful tool you can use to manage and identify stakeholders is the stakeholder matrix. Stakeholders are added to a two by two grid according to how they fit into certain characteristics. For example, stakeholders could be high power or high interest. Other possible characteristics that are commonly used are the power versus interest, power versus influence and impact versus influence. The stakeholders that land in the high, high quadrant are the ones that require the most attention.