The Late Stakeholders: Engage Them Before It's Too Late!

Mike Donoghue is a member of a multinational information technology corporation where he collaborates on the communications guidelines and customer relationship strategies affecting the interactions with internal and external clients. He has analyzed, defined, designed and overseen processes for various engagements including product usability and customer satisfaction, best practice enterprise standardization, relationship/branding structures, and distribution effectiveness and direction. He has also established corporate library solutions to provide frameworks for sales, marketing, training, and support divisions.

  Stakeholder Management  

Despite what your experience with stakeholders in the past has been, they want your project to succeed. Admittedly, they may want a more “fluid” approach to accommodate project changes and enhancements to scope as the course of a project unfolds, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t care about the final outcome.

If anything, it may be that they care too much—just not at a level that takes into consideration the constraints that define a project (resources, development and testing time, analysis, etc.). It may be that they are adversarial and create frustrations within the project team (however, that does not mean that they are intentionally adding conflict as an add-on to the final deliverable).

While it may come to a point where you choose to be dismissive of these stakeholders because of the difficulties they initiate, they are still valuable assets that need to be taken into serious consideration.

When Do You Start Involving Them?
Although stakeholders need to be identified early on in a project, they don’t all need to be engaged throughout its many stages—just the more influential agents. That being said, what you don’t need is a stakeholder presence that is only felt during fleeting moments of a project, particularly at the end when timeframes are tight. This is when special surprises occur and stakeholders who may…

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