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Regardless what your business is, effectively engaging your stakeholders is a critical success factor. Your stakeholders may be external customers, internal sponsors, your team, other organizations. Working effectively with them will put you on the path to success.
Develop and maintain an environment of mutual understanding and buy-in. Open communication channels, transparent and effective decision-making, timely and quality delivery, and well-integrated services will foster a strong relationship with your stakeholders and increase their buy-in. Without it, your efforts may be at risk.
Here are 10 questions to help you effectively engage with your stakeholders.
- Who is the most impacted by what you are doing?
- Who has the ability to have the most impact on what you are doing?
- How do you make your objectives and success criteria known to your stakeholders?
- How do you gauge your stakeholders buy-in and commitment?
- How are you managing the commitments and expectations?
- What are you doing to create awareness among the stakeholders of the progress and contributions of both your work and individual contributors on the team?
- How do your deliverables and work products come together to meet the overall objectives?
- How do you hold the team and stakeholders accountable for executing in a timely and quality manner?
- How do you identify and manage risks to and from your stakeholders?
- How are you including your stakeholders in your decision-making?
Re-examine your engagement model continuously. Your stakeholders will change, and so will their buy-in. Most importantly, their key requirements will likely change and you will need to adapt.
Contributed by Bob McAuliffe. Bob works with technology and business leaders to forge a strong partnership and increase the value they contribute to the bottom line. He can be contacted via email at bob@xcution.com
Reid Henry
Jane Henry
