Skill 4 – Stakeholder management

This is a key skill in most, if not all, careers. As developers or managers, we all have stakeholders to be accountable to and to satisfy by fulfilling their requirements and expectations. Specific to managers, but often forgotten, is the fact that their own team is a key stakeholder. This could be their own development team or a matrix project team.

As we have already discussed Skill 3 – Team leadership, which covers the main principles of managing your own team as key stakeholders, for the remainder of this chapter, our focus will be on stakeholder management from a project manager's perspective. This angle covers the remaining key aspects of the essence of stakeholder management, which boils down to building and maintaining relationships, and setting and meeting expectations.

The Association for Project Management (APM) explains this best in a simple and logical sequence of four steps:

1. Identify stakeholders
2. Assess their interest and influence
3. Develop communication management plans
4. Engage and influence stakeholders

When identifying stakeholders, you can use a similar approach to the RACI model for your team. But the key here is to make sure that you cast the net wide enough to include the stakeholders who will be indirectly impacted by your work, as well as those directly impacted and actually doing the work; for example, the product owner of an integrated system, and the application support team, if they're a separate entity. All of these people are part of your stakeholder ecology.

The following is a great example of stakeholder ecology for a services company that markets toward travelers. The purpose of constructing a diagram such as this is to widen your focus enough to give yourself as much of a 360-degree view as possible, as well as extending each connection to be long enough to understand the chain reaction and downstream effects of your software products: