Prioritizing Stakeholder Communications

Communication is critical to any project's success.  But to whom do you communicate?  How ofter? Using which medium?  These are not questions to be lightly considered.  Your success depends on the answers to each.

 

To Whom Do You Communicate?

Your project's stakeholders include the customer, upper management, members of your core team, extended team members and anyone who has any interest in your project. You need to communicate with each of them. However without some parameters, this can (and usually does) consume your every waking hour. You must prioritize your communication efforts. We suggest the Audience Focus Tool below to assist in this effort.

Audience Focus Tool

Communication with stakeholders in the bottom two quadrants (especially Influence) is important to initiate or nourish support for your project. Use stakeholders in the top quadrants (where support is high) to assist and build support. Your time available for communication should be budgeted to ensure you are building support for the project as well as maintaining existing support. The squeaky wheel analogy is really true here. Listen for unmet needs and focus time and effort on stakeholders in the Influence quadrant. This tool helps to properly allocate precious communication efforts / time.

 

How Do You Communicate?

Recognizing stakeholder needs / interests is important here. Today, no one needs / wants communication that isn’t focused on an immediate need or interest. Just recall the last telemarketing call you received during an evening meal. Ask yourself “What are this stakeholder’s interests in this project?” then be certain that your communications focus on those needs. Remember, management needs communication about all three elements of the triple constraint (time, cost and quality). Individual style preferences are reviewed below in the Styles Matrix.

Styles Matrix

Use of tools like Meyers-Briggs or DiSC (as shown above) to identify personal preferences can help you tailor the message to meet their individual information preferences. The first bullet in each box identifies the format preferences for each of the DiSC styles. Subsequent bullets identify the types of information commonly of interest to the person possessing that style. To use this tool it is important to be able to accurately identify individual style preferences. You should do this for each of your stakeholders, including core team members. Then, using members of your team with a particular profile to assist in communicating with stakeholders of the same preferences is a wonderful time saving idea that can serve to motivate core team members as well.

 

How Often To Communicate?

Stakeholders in the bottom two quadrants of the Audience Focus Tool will need the most frequent communication (especially those in Influence). We suggest two levels of communication; broadcast and targeted. Broadcast (possibly minutes from the core team meetings) should be enough for stakeholders in the top two quadrants of the Audience Focus Tool and for those in the D or C quadrants of the Styles Matrix. Targeted communications should be as often as the stakeholder wants them. Those in the I or S quadrants of the Styles Matrix or the top two quadrants of the Audience Focus Tool will need less frequent communications.