Hi, I'm Luke Angel and this is Managing Project Stakeholders. This course covers how to effective identify, engage, and manage your project stakeholders. We'll begin by exploring the big picture and looking at the business need for stakeholder management. Then I'll review success factors in project management and how stakeholder management fits in. Next, I'll guide you through a review of strategies to identify stakeholders and create a stakeholder map.

I've included some background information for our Kinetico Alternative Energy Company to provide some framework for the showcased wind energy project we'll use in this program, along with examples and templates to show you what's possible for your projects. I think it will help provide some real world connections by pairing our course content with a case study to show how to apply the concepts we explore.

 I've included a case study project with this course to provide illustrations on use of concepts and templates we discuss during the program. The sample fictitious project we will use throughout this course is the development of a large wind turbine farm on a site located east of Fort Collins, Colorado, in the United States of America. The electricity produced, as a result of this wind energy project, will be sold to the local electricity utility companies to provide electrical power to both residential and commercial customers.

 The term stakeholder means: "An organization, group, or individual "who could impact or be impacted by your project." They literally "have a stake in" or are affected by an activity, decision, or outcome of your project work. It's often easy to spot key stakeholders, those who have money, resources, or power on the project. Yet a good project team will be certain to identify all stakeholders for ultimate project success.

 Throughout the project, you'll interact with stakeholders in various and different ways depending on the stage of your project. Stakeholders and their roles must be identified early in the project, as the stakeholders needs and wants are critical elements in the determination of your project requirements and deliverables. While creating the project charter, the key stakeholders at the highest levels, are typically identified to review the charter and sign off on the project. Once the project is approved and proceeded to the project team, a deeper dive is done to identify all stakeholders.

The Standish Group has been notoriously publishing their CHAOS Report with IT project success, failure, and challenged rates for many years. While their report happens to focus on IT projects, the study can provide insight on all types of projects. Their report will list those things that, if present, will lead to success and, if absent or challenged, could lead to project failure. The most recent research report showed the top 10 as Executive support, User involvement, Clear business objectives, Emotional maturity, Optimizing scope, Agile process, Project management expertise, Skilled resources Execution, Tools & Infrastructure.

We can find guidance on stakeholder management from a number of different sources and professional organizations. From a project management perspective, we can look to project management body of knowledge, or PMBOK, published by the project management institute in the United States, to projects in controlled environments, also known as PRINCE2, created by the cabinet office in the United Kingdom, along with a commercial entity for European professional standards. Or Agile groups and organizations with their many forms from extreme programming to scrum.

When a project like our wind energy initiatives under consideration, mature organizations will write a business case and draft a project charter first. Then, present the idea to an oversight committee or governance board to review the cost of the project, compared to the benefits the project generates. If the project is select, the governing committee or board will then sign the charter. The charter includes our senior stakeholders and decision makers. 

You've gathered the stakeholder's identifying information, their positions, locations, role, and contact details in the analysis worksheet or stakeholder register. Next, assessment information about the stakeholder's requirements and expectations are elicited along with potential influencers and phases of the project in which each stakeholder has the most interest. You've made note of the stakeholder's commitment to the project, and their relationship to others involved with the project.

You also classified the stakeholders as internal or external, and supporter or advocate, a bystander or a potential resistor. Your next step is to create a power and interest grid to plot the individual information gathered into a diagram that represents the entire stakeholder group. On the vertical axis, you capture the power as Low, Medium, or High, and on the horizontal axis, track their interest in the project as Low, Medium or High.

You've seen in our wind energy project that there are many stakeholders. Each project stakeholder has varying expectations. Stakeholder prioritization can be challenging on large projects. You have documented your stakeholder analysis in the stakeholder register and examined the Power Interest grid. Let's see how the Salience Model helps put project stakeholders into perspective. Unlike the Power Interest, or Power Influence grids, the Salience Model uses three parameters to categorize stakeholders: Power, Legitimacy, and Urgency.

The purpose of designing a stakeholder engagement strategy is to find the required level of stakeholder involvement, and the associated scope of activities each stakeholder will ideally support. This step also helps set expectations about when and how stakeholder groups will be engaged throughout your project's life cycle. Proper planning and communication will allow you to proactively manage activities to sustain your stakeholders' level of engagement, build buy-in and commitment, and address any potential roadblocks.

Let's take a moment and look at the management skills most needed while engaging your stakeholders. Net our project managers have a vast array of management skills they have built over the course of their career. Those that will probably help you the most to manage and engage your stakeholders include: facilitation skills, your ability to influence people, your negotiation ability, and your flexibility and talent in getting people to accept the change the project is creating. Let's look at some of our wind energy internal stakeholders.

There are many interpersonal skills project managers might apply during a project. Let's take a moment and look at a few key interpersonal skills that can help you, while engaging your stakeholders. You want to have a good understanding of communication methods available to you, and an awareness of the best method for key stakeholders, given their own unique personalities and their positional power within the organization. There are many personality profile tools available to help organizations improve communications.

To review our process steps for managing our project stakeholders, we started with the identification step to determine who our stakeholders are. Next, we did an analysis profile to sort out power, interest, and salience. Then, we reviewed how and when to engage management and interpersonal skills. Implementing stakeholder engagement strategies is not just for the project manager. When our key team members and our coalition of leaders all work together, apply solid management and interpersonal skills, along with clear communication techniques, we'll get our best results.

We recommended near the beginning of your project, you conduct the stakeholder analysis to gather input from people who have power, interest, and influence over the success of the project. By establishing effective methods of measuring stakeholder satisfaction, project managers can measure how well their stakeholder expectations were addressed during the project as a measure of the project's success. Three methods to consider are surveys, focus groups, and interviews.

Conducting online surveys to gather and measure a stakeholder's satisfaction with project progress, or final outcomes first involves selecting a tool, such as Survey Gizmo, SurveyMonkey, or Boomerang. Some of these tools are free, some charge a fee to create and execute your online survey and compile the results. To design an effective survey, the project manager should generate a short list of questions, covering relevant areas you wish to measure, regarding project performance.