Stakeholder Engagement Essentials You Always Wanted To Know: Self Learning Management

By Vibrant Publishers and Michelle Bartonico

• Identify key stakeholders in a project
• Understand the fundamentals of managing stakeholders
• Discover helpful approaches and strategies to engage stakeholders
• Learn how to build a Stakeholder Engagement plan
• Respond to stakeholder scenarios with the eye of a Project Manager

Stakeholder Engagement is the lifeblood of project management because stakeholders can make or break a project.

 

In Stakeholder Engagement Essentials You Always Wanted To Know, you will explore how to balance the tenets of project management with the uncertainties of human behavior. This book provides foundational essentials of Stakeholder Engagement along with practical techniques and tools to successfully navigate projects and your relationship with people in an organization. You can apply what you learn anytime you need to move a project, a conversation, or a partnership forward.

The book does not just state techniques to engage with stakeholders but makes learning fun and engaging with the help of case studies, activities, and tips that will tickle your brain and make your wear the hat of a Project Manager. You will gain a deeper understanding of project management and stakeholder engagement tools like Project Charters, Stakeholder Register, Power/Interest Matrix, etc.

Whether someone is a team lead, executive, or team member, it's essential to know how to anticipate, monitor, and engage people throughout the life cycle of a project and beyond.

By the end of Stakeholder Engagement Essentials, you will have a playbook for engaging stakeholders to achieve project success and deliver value to your organization.

This book is part of the Self-Learning Management Series designed to help students, managers, career switchers, and entrepreneurs learn essential management lessons.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vibrant Publishers
• Release date: Jan 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9781636511528

Book preview

Introduction to Stakeholder Engagement

The investment of time in Stakeholder Engagement is extensive, but it’s required to meet existing project goals, deliver business value, and set the stage for long-term success.

The tools and case studies throughout this book will help you gain a deeper understanding of how to establish productive professional relationships with people who are invested or interested in your project.

Before progressing to the next few chapters that outline the steps within Stakeholder Engagement, be sure to have a firm grasp of what Stakeholder Engagement is and what it is not. Let’s get started.

1.1 What is Stakeholder Engagement

Stakeholder Engagement is a combination of thoughtful, intentional planning and project management knowledge coupled with a lens toward empathy and building interpersonal relationships. It is the art of engaging people rather than managing them. Contrary to someone feeling managed, when people are engaged, they are motivated, participatory, and more likely to be a resource. Before discussing stakeholders any further, let's level-set by simplifying a definition from the PMBOK® Guide. Stakeholders are any person or organization that is, or believes they are, affected by a given project.

As evident in the above definition, it's apparent that project stakeholders are unavoidable. They are the thread throughout any project – creating feelings of joy and chaos in their wake. This makes the Stakeholder Knowledge Area (or Stakeholder Performance Domain in the 7th edition PMBOK® Guide) one of the most dynamic in project management.

When the term Performance Domain is used, someone is subscribing to the latest PMBOK® Guide where the Stakeholder Performance Domain describes the artifacts and approaches needed to engage with stakeholders.

Stakeholders are the thread throughout all phases of a project - so it is vital to have a foundational understanding of what Stakeholder Engagement is (and what it is not).

As you navigate project or organizational stakeholders, you will begin to hear references to terminology, methods, and principles from the 7th edition of PMBOK® Guide so, it’s important to highlight some of the key differences in this latest edition, as outlined in Table 1.1, to ensure you are able to speak the language and lead project teams with shared understanding. In many ways, the 7th edition acknowledges the importance of balancing technical and soft skills with its focus on lean, agile, and customer-centric design along with the shift to value delivery and project outcomes in addition to deliverables. Terminology aside, if you are a project stakeholder, you’ll probably want your project manager to share the views of the 7th edition because people, value, and quality outweigh the emphasis on process and

Reviews for Stakeholder Engagement Essentials You Always Wanted To Know

[bonifasius parikesit · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Awsome book, must read it

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[remikit · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Stakeholder Engagement. Engagement was the word missing in the PMBOK terminology until the 7th edition. What was once a list of tools and tips is now expanded in the latest PMBOK into a Performance Principle. Michelle Bartonico, the author of Stakeholder Engagement, provides a deeper understanding of what is typically called stakeholder management. She asks project managers to stop working on their projects as if they were tinkering with a machine and look at them with a human perspective. Early in the book, she writes, "Stakeholder Engagement is a combination of thoughtful, intentional planning and project management knowledge coupled with a lens toward empathy and building interpersonal relationships. It is the art of engaging people rather than managing them." In the version of the PMBOK that I picked up at the start of my career, the emphasis was the opposite. And at that time, there were no books to explain the difference. Stakeholder Engagement breaks the silence on this topic by explaining not just how to identify stakeholders, but also how to work with them throughout your project. Rather than ticking off a series of milestones, with her guidance, you will be more likely to bring a "human-centric mindset and endeavor to deliver value to stakeholders and to your organization." Bartonico argues that this distinction is the difference between successful and unsuccessful projects.The trouble with trying to explain a concept that leans heavily on the practice of the techniques is that is easy to leave the information on the page. You have to explain the combination of tools and techniques and then remind readers that they must take action after using them. Bartonico does a wonderful job of doing this in the book, pivoting from tools and techniques in the first four chapters to a focus on action. The next chapter focuses on how to bring a human-centric mindset to your work by improving your ability to empathize with your stakeholders and actively listen to their needs. The final two chapters in the book extend 'Stakeholder engagement' beyond the customers of your project to the members of your team. The idea that your project teammembers are among your stakeholders is not unusual. Her recommendation to use the same stakeholder mapping tools to improve your relationship with them did surprise me. In many cases, I had substituted my experiences with working with the same group of people with a disciplined analysis of the roles they play on the project and the unique ways each of them shine. My biggest takeaways from the book will not be the tools and techniques, but 1) the emphasis on the soft skills and 2) Replacing the word Engage with Manage. I wish I had found this book earlier in my career. I would have had an easier road. For a new project manager, this would be an excellent book on stakeholder engagement. For those experienced project managers who understand that there must be more to the dry section on stakeholder management in PMBOK, this book will unlock a new perspective.