Deliverable 2-Effective Data Visualization

Your identified stakeholders will probably encompass diverse backgrounds and a wide range of operational skills such as engineering, management, finance, and others. Due to this diversity, your presentation or project will have to appeal to and hold the interest of the majority of the audience.

Before you begin preparing, ensure that your supervisor or manager supports you and that you have adequate resources at your disposal. Depending upon the timeline that you have been given for developing your presentation or project, you might have to enlist the aid of some of your fellow associates.

What can you do to gain information on your stakeholder’s backgrounds and abilities? This is a very important question because your stakeholders will determine the success or failure of your presentation or project.

All of your stakeholders have common characteristics in regards to your presentation or project.

· The degree of their interest in your project.

· The power they hold that can affect your project.

· Their attitude towards your project could be any one of the following:

· Negative

· Positive

· Neutral

· The potential impact that they might have on your project, either formally or informally.

All four of these characteristics or categories have standard strategies shown in the diagrams below:

With these characteristics in mind you can create a detailed stakeholder analysis that will give you:

1. A fairly good estimate of each stakeholders priorities

2. The development of a refined strategy to engage with each stakeholder

To understand your stakeholder’s position in regards to your presentation or project, you will need to develop an understanding of their agenda. Also, you need to know how strongly they feel about your work. To develop an effective method to engage each stakeholder, you will also need to have an appreciation for his or her background and attitudes. If the stakeholder happens to be an entity or group, you will need to understand its internal subtleties and key players.

Before you make contact with any stakeholder, you need to ask four basic questions:

1. Who are the stakeholders?

2. What can they offer? What do they want from us?

3. How best to communicate with them?

4. What risks are involved, and what opportunities could they bring to the table?

Persona Data

If you want to dig deep and have the resources available, you might want to develop a persona card for each of your stakeholders. A persona card is a record you use to record all the information you collect on stakeholders. It takes work, but if the majority of your stakeholders are internal to your organization, your HR department might help you out. Social media is another way of gathering information on stakeholders; professional connection applications such as LinkedIn or Trade sites can help you gather this information.

You can enter all stakeholder data gathered into a database or a contact application. Some of the factors that you might want to consider are the stakeholder’s role, experience, education, and professional qualifications. You will also want contact information such as a phone number and an e-mail address. Depending on the project, you may also want to list their attitudes, interests, needs, power, influence, and, impact.

How to Gather Stakeholder Information

Hold a Stakeholder Analysis Workshop

· Utilize the collective knowledge of your team.

· Identify, analyze, and possibly plan for stakeholder engagement.

Role-Playing

· Have members of your team play the parts of your stakeholders.

· Run through some various scenarios, and have other team players ask them questions.

· Have your role-playing team members respond as though they were actual stakeholders.

Questionnaires

· Be aware that your survey might be the first communication your stakeholders receive about your project. Take every effort to make sure the product has a professional appearance; this first contact will give your stakeholders the first impression of your work.

· Use a web-based survey tool such as Survey Monkey or Type form to promote a professional image.

· Keep your questions to a minimum and to the point.

One-on-One Meetings with Stakeholders

· Use the same agenda for every meeting.

· Make sure your agenda provides adequate questions and acquires all the facts that you need.

· End the meeting by providing contact information.

Overall, you want your audience to accept your presentation or project, but as can be seen, there are many phases of planning and work necessary to acquire new project acceptance. This acceptance can be expected if you properly evaluate your audience’s background and skills way before your presentation or project takes place.