Managing these parts is fundamental to the project's success, so much so that in the fifth edition of the PMBOK Guide, it was included as a new area: the stakeholder management, in which stakeholders are identified, and information about their influences, expectations, and interests is planned, managed, and controlled.

Stakeholder management serves to anticipate opportunities and facilitate the prevention of problems and the Improvement in project communication. Continue reading and understand how a project manager can do this.

What is stakeholder management?

The PMBOK Guide considers stakeholder management to be all processes undertaken with the objective of identifying people, institutions, or groups that can impact or be impacted by a project.

In practice, an analysis is made of stakeholders' expectations and their influence on the project, in order to develop the best strategies for management that aims to result in effective stakeholder engagement.

According to the guide developed by the PMI (Project Management Institute), stakeholder management requires the completion of the following steps:

• Stakeholder Identification
• Stakeholder Management Planning
• Stakeholder engagement management
• Stakeholder Engagement Control

How to perform a gap analysis?

To make it easier to understand how stakeholder management is done in practice, let's explain each of the steps to be followed in more detail.

1- Identify the parties involved

Identifying stakeholders involves listing all individuals or groups who can influence the success of the project in any way. To do this, it's useful to brainstorm and record all parties who potentially have an interest in the project, regardless of the size of their impact on or from each one.

It is important to describe these groups and their participants in a way that allows for a thorough understanding of the stakeholders, in order to identify how they can impact or be impacted by any activity, decision, or results of the project.

2- Analyze your interests and expectations

This step is to understand what each stakeholder wants. To do this, it is necessary to describe the expectations and interests of each of those involved regarding the project.

At this moment, it is crucial to evaluate both the positive and negative aspects of these interests, as some may be detrimental to the initiative. It is from this analysis that it will be possible to deeply understand the stakeholders and define how they should be treated.

3- Classify the parties involved

After knowing who is involved and what they intend, the level of influence of each stakeholder on the project should be defined. To do this, the next step is to classify them in order of importance, according to their degree of power, impact, susceptibility, and interest.

This classification serves to clarify each stakeholder's capacity to advance or halt the project. It also aims to facilitate the development of a specific strategy for each one.

4- Create an approach plan

After identifying and classifying the stakeholders, as well as their expectations and needs, it's time to define how each one will be approached to manage their involvement, which requires two skills from the manager: negotiation and communication.

It is essential to plan in detail how the relationship will be with each different type of stakeholder, in order to avoid unnecessary clashes, maintain an open dialog and increase stakeholder engagement.

Plan to communication With stakeholders, it ensures that everyone's objectives are aligned and that project parts can be involved when necessary. It is worth noting that ideally, in stakeholder management, stakeholders should be involved from the very beginning of the work.

The manager should focus their attention on those who “bought into the idea” from the beginning, as these individuals can motivate others and reduce potential resistance. It is also worthwhile to establish alliances with those responsible for the resources necessary for the project's development.

The secret is to always maintain an open channel of accountability for the project's progress, to eliminate distrust and resistance that can harm the outcome.

Following these steps and tips, it will be possible to achieve good stakeholder management and, consequently, good project management, with good results for everyone involved.

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