Monitor Stakeholder Engagement

In order to ensure stakeholder engagement is successful project managers should take the lead in overseeing, altering, and protecting their approach to the project, as well as the connection established with stakeholders. When faced with modifications or hurdles, the project manager should have an action plan in hand to maintain a discourse and address any arising problems.

Project managers must carefully consider stakeholder engagement as projects are created for the people's benefit. Any action they take will have a direct effect on the stakeholders although their reaction to it might be different from what is expected. To make sure all parties understand the importance of the decisions it is important to keep the lines of communication open. Engaging stakeholders should be considered when managing any project for this reason requiring the project manager to pay special attention to all the decisions made.

Now before we get into what's going on here, I want to talk about a pattern that you're going to see with control scope, control schedule, control costs, control quality, control resources, monitor communication, monitor risk, control procurements, and monitor stakeholder engagement. So in other words, from scope down, the monitoring and controlling process, you're going to have work performance data. In most cases, this is a little bit of an exception, the outputs. 

It's a consistent pattern but in most of them, you're going to have work performance data as an input. And you will always have, and like we see here, work performance information out, change requests out, project management plan updates out, and project documents updates out. So those are going to be consistent as far as the outputs go, and that's going to be about two and a half percent of your total inputs, tools, techniques, and outputs in all 49 processes.

Now that said, let's talk about what this process does for us. Monitor stakeholder engagement is a feedback loop, essentially. We can watch and see how we are engaging stakeholders. If things are going well, then this process shows us to stay the course, don't make any adjustments, keep doing what you're doing. If we have holes between where we need stakeholders to be and where they are, this process can send us back to the stakeholder engagement plan to make adjustments. If we change stakeholders like somebody changes roles or quits or something, we potentially could go back to identify stakeholders and update the stakeholder register. We could also see, for example, that maybe we need to add some communication requirements or change some communication requirements. 

So if we think about this process, it's a feedback loop that can send us back anywhere, loosely anywhere but primarily it's going to be to any sort of a stakeholder or communication process for us to make adjustments with communication requirements or how we're going to engage stakeholders and who those stakeholders are and what their roles are. So again, this is our fourth and final process in stakeholder. It is a monitoring and controlling process. It follows manage stakeholder engagement which was an executing process."

When managing a project it is essential to monitor stakeholder engagement throughout its entire lifecycle. The monitoring of stakeholder engagement is essential for all projects to make sure they move forward, all stakeholders remain supportive, and sponsors and financiers are held to account. This monitoring process should start immediately at the project's inception and carry on until it is finalized. This is especially vital for larger projects, as they require extra attention to ensure they succeed. Keeping track of stakeholders and their engagement will facilitate the progression of the project, motivate stakeholders to remain involved, and make sure sponsors and payers remain reliable. All in all, monitoring stakeholder engagement is fundamental for the success of any project.