- Gaining and maintaining stakeholder engagement is crucial for project success because they are the individuals or groups of people who have an interest in or are impacted by the project's outcomes. The APM defines stakeholder engagement as the systematic identification, analysis planning, and implementation of actions designed to influence stakeholders. In this video, we'll discuss the four steps of stakeholder engagement, how to prioritize stakeholders and the benefits of stakeholder engagement. Engaging with your stakeholders, make sure that they continue to support your project all the way through. It also helps you to remove or minimize opposition to your project. As a project manager, you need to use a few different strategies to build and maintain trust in your stakeholder community. You'll also need good interpersonal skills to effectively negotiate with internal and external stakeholders, and manage any conflict. But you don't need to do all of this on your own, your team are there to support you. And each member should be actively involved in stakeholder engagement throughout the project. Stakeholder engagement starts at the projects concept as this is when stake holder influence is at its highest. However, it's a dynamic and iterative process and you should revisit it throughout the life cycle. Remember that stakeholder engagement isn't an exact science, you'll need to use your own judgment and experience. There is a simple four step process you can use to engage stakeholders. Firstly, identify who they are. There are a few ways you can do this, from interviews, workshops, or even just looking at previous projects to create a list of stakeholders. Next, you need to analyze what their relative interest is in the project. You can use a power and interest grid to do this and I'll go into how to do that in a little bit more detail in a moment. Once you've analyzed the relative interest and importance of your stakeholders, you'll need to create a plan for how you will engage with them. Effective communication with stakeholders is one of the ways you can do this, which means you need to share information about things like who will be communicating with them and when that person will do so. Last up, engage with your stakeholders by putting your communication plan into action, helping you to manage conflict as well as negotiate, manage and control progress. As promised, let's talk a little bit about power and interest grids quickly. As this is a useful tool you can use as part of your stakeholder analysis. Not all of your stakeholders will be equal and some will be more important than others. So you'll need to know who they are to prioritize their needs. You can do this by classifying your stakeholders by their relative power and interest in a grid like this. If stakeholders are high in both scenes, then they need to be engaged with regularly, with their perspective taken very seriously. If they're only powerful but have a low interest, they need to be satisfied. And if they're only interested but with no power, they just need to be kept informed. If they have low power and low interest, then they only need to be monitored. There are at least five benefits that come with effective stakeholder engagement. You will increase support for the project and boost the number of allies who can help influence others and increase your chances of getting the resources you need. You will minimize resistance allowing you to focus on project delivery. You can increase the chance of deliverable acceptance from stakeholders who you've consulted and listened to throughout the engagement process, and lastly, you'll build a safe and trusting environment which in turn will improve your team's decision making and communication. And that's it for this video. We're following the four steps stakeholder engagement process. You can realize the benefits of effective stakeholder engagement and ensure that your project program or portfolio is a success.