Stakeholder Management Assessment and Summary

Stakeholder Management Assessment and Summary of Project Stakeholder Management Assessing the relative contributions and roles of stakeholders while also determining the best possible strategies for enabling higher levels of stakeholder trust is one of the many findings from the study Project Stakeholder Management (Karlsen, 2002). The author has completed an empirical study of project management professionals in his native nation of Norway, relying on a stratified sample of industries as the sampling frame.

His methodology is based on a series of hypotheses centered on the creation of a new methodology for stakeholder management. Using a 5-point Likert Scale to measure stakeholder influence and perception of collaboration including trust across stakeholders by industries, the researcher creates a foundation for their defined stakeholder management process. This approach provides empirically-derived data showing how trust is an accelerator of effective stakeholder management and that a project manager must have a high degree of emotional intelligence to sense and create these interrelationships throughout the duration of a project.

The research methodology and resulting analysis defines stakeholders as clients, end users, contractors, consultants, labor unions, line organizations, public authorities, financial institutions, insurance companies, controlling organizations, media, third parties and competitors (Karlsen, 2002). The author and researcher has set three primary goals for their research which includes defining which stakeholder is most important to a given project; which stakeholders cause the most uncertainty and problems to a project; and what should be developed to improve project stakeholder management overall (Karlsen, 2002).

Assessment and Summary of Project Stakeholder Management Project management professionals often are conflicted as to which stakeholders to give the most attention to, and in so doing, provide them with greater control over a project. The results presented in Project Stakeholder Management indicate that all stakeholders have an equal potential to disrupt a project, and that this approach of attempting to mitigate interruptions is of limited value (Karlsen, 2002).

The author and research contends that stakeholders must be given the opportunity to be catalysts of project vision, mission and goal definition beyond the traditional project and stakeholder management tools; they must have an opportunity to create trust between themselves and with the project leader (Karlsen, 2002). The stakeholders of the most successful projects are the catalyst of the traditional managerial functions of planning, organizing, leading, motivating and defining control measures as well (Karlsen, 2002).

The observation is also made that the reliance purely on the mechanics of stakeholder management aren't nearly as valuable as having a more unified, highly integrated platform of trust across all stakeholders. The goal of stakeholder management isn't the defining of the status quo from stakeholder requirements or interruptions; it is the creation and solidifying of a very high level of trust and shared risk and reward mindset across the entire stakeholder team.

To enable this level of cross-stakeholder trust and communication, the author has defined a six-step process that is designed for iterative process definition and development of trust-based relationships. These six processes include initial planning, identification, analysis, communication, action and follow-up (Karlsen, 2002). Based on the attitudinal data captured with the 5-point Likert Scale questionnaires given to Norwegian project management professionals the finding.