Stakeholders Management: Achieving Consensus for Successful Project Execution

Introduction

Influencing, convincing and persuading all of the internal and external stakeholders such as clients, contractors, consultants, vendors, teams are essential and critical for successful projects and business as usual execution. It is a relationship game. Securing the buy-in of individuals confidently, skillfully and competently where you don’t have direct authority and control can support a drive for operational excellence and business continuity. Tricky, challenging, demanding and complicated stakeholders could be driving the mission-critical decisions. So managing effectively and navigating successfully the complex relationship between these stakeholders is essential for any business and project professionals.

Often stakeholders tend to bring in their own interest with hidden agendas, so normalizing the differences and achieving consensus for seamless is extremely crucial. The strategic project professional uses the views, interests, and attitudes of stakeholders to shape a project at an early stage, keeping support throughout the lifecycle of their project and improving project deliverables down the line. Stakeholders Management is an essential skill set used frequently in meetings, business negotiations and when developing and communicating the business case for a new initiative.

Objectives

By the end of this programme, participants should be able to:

• Understand stakeholder needs
• Understand how stakeholders impact your project
• Know how to deal with multiple stakeholders with divergent interests
• Understand how to manage stakeholder expectations, including quality and performance expectations
• Understand the need to communicate your strategy to the project team, the customer, and other project stakeholders
• Resolve conflict and competing priorities
• Manage project public relations and organisational politics
• Contain expectations through effective status reporting and progress meetings 

Training Methodology

The training methodology is interactive with group exercises and is suitable for all employees involved in functions management. The pace and level of the training workshop is customized to the understanding of the delegates. Ongoing back-up and support is available after the training on request to the supplier, and the training course is also available for in-house presentation as well as for “Competency Transfer”.

Who Should Attend?

• Any Professionals/Teams involved in Projects and Business as usual Negotiators and Consultants
• Functional Team
• Project Professionals/Team
• Commercial Team
• Strategic Decision Makers/Executives involved in Decision Making
• Supply Chain Executives/Professionals
• Sales and Marketing Team

Course Outline

Day 1: Understanding the Rules of Engagement and Navigating the Stakeholders Relationship Game

• Identification and categorisation of stakeholders
• Understanding stakeholder expectations
• The role of management in the stakeholder environment
• Evaluation and prioritisation of interests
• Determination of relevance of stakeholders
• Prioritising Stakeholders
• Visualising the stakeholder community
• Stakeholder requirements analysis

Day 2: Managing Competing Stakeholders Expectations and Normalizing the Differences

• Stakeholder mapping
• How committed are they to the project?
• What makes them tick?
• Aligning stakeholder requirements to business and organisational objectives
• Prioritising stakeholder requirements and expectation
• Selling the project
• Maintaining the commitment
• Working with resistance for positive outcomes

Day 3: Relationship Building with the Stakeholders and Achieving Consensus

• The science and art of communicating effectively
• Common communications barriers and “filters”
• Dealing with organisation politics
• Managing external stakeholders such as suppliers, regulators and the public
• Selecting communication methodologies to get your messages across
• Managing difficult stakeholders
• Managing expectations that can’t be met
• Resolving conflict

Day 4: Strategies for Confidently, Competently and Skilfully Influencing, Persuading and Negotiating with Stakeholders

• Who to influence?
• The Elements of Influence
• Different types of influencing strategies
• Push and pull-type behaviours
• Tools, skills and behaviours of effective influencing
• Engage stakeholders: building the relationship
• Stakeholder participation and engagement
• Road map to successful influencing

Day 5: Stakeholders Rapport Management and Maintaining Execution Harmony

• Use of position, knowledge, or personal power
• Developing rapport
• Personality preferences
• Achieving and maintaining a commitment
• Recognising manipulation and taking positive action
• Establishing and maintaining trust
• Dealing with Challenging Behaviours
• Converting confrontation into cooperation