group work

Stakeholder Communications and Analysis

Effective communication is regarded as one of the most crucial aspects of a project or any change initiative. Therefore, this stakeholders' communications and analysis plan will help address the core questions around the project's communication efforts (Jain et al., 2017). The following are some of the critical questions that are essential in planning for stakeholders' communications and analysis.

· Who are the people who need to know about your change?

· What are the likely concerns for each group?

· How are you going to ensure they understand it?

· What are the key points you need each group of people to know/understand?

· How will you respond to them to ensure you build a critical mass that supports your change?

Stakeholder Analysis

A stakeholder analysis refers to the essential way people who are required to know about the change are identified and their likely concern in the project. Therefore, presented below is a brief guide that will help develop a stakeholder analysis (Alsulaimi & Abdullah, 2020). The steps involved include.

Step II: Categorizing Stakeholders

In this step, it is very instrumental to categorize all stakeholders regarding their influence and attention. What needs to be considered is the amount of influence that every stakeholder group has or will have on the project's success or any change that is likely to be incurred (Alsulaimi & Abdullah, 2020). Additionally, every stakeholder group's possible attention concerning the project's success needs to be considered. However, there is a great need to map each stakeholder group in terms of Influence – Attention as shown in the diagram below.

High	Top Management CONSULT Employees INFORM		Organizational Professional staff and Head of departments CONSULT OFTEN Board of Directors CONSULT
Influence
Low
	Low	Attention	High

Mapping Influence and Attention

To continue with this example of a change that involves project management and communication of any change required in the project, the board of directors, administrative, professional staff, and Head of departments may all have a high degree of both influence and attention in enabling the success of the change initiative as well as the success of the project (Di Maria, 2018). Employees may have low influence and insufficient attention. It's essential to monitor stakeholders over time; the Head of departments may increase in attentiveness due to a number of factors as the change initiative evolves, so may the customers and suppliers.

Stakeholder Management

Throughout the project, every stakeholder must be managed to meet all their communication needs. Therefore, with the use of information systems, a stakeholder will be tracked to ensure that he/she is adequately moving to his/her desired place of project buy-in (Eskerod & Larsen, 2018). that means all stakeholders don't need to be in full approval; it is essential to ensure acceptance to minimize any chances of active opposition.

Communication Plan

Provided that there is a better understanding of who the stakeholders are, it is now time to develop an effective communication plan. Nevertheless, the communication plan is responsible for providing a well-planned, structured approach to communications. It ensures that all stakeholders are involved in achieving the project's objective through consultations of their areas of interest and concern.

Key Messages: the key messages that are required to reinforce a communication need to be considered. But they will be very different for each stage of the project or change initiative (Alsulaimi & Abdullah, 2020). Therefore, below are some example of critical messages that relate to the success of a project of any change initiative that might arise in the process of completing a project.

· The new methodologies introduced in the project have an evidence base that supports the project as a superior practice.

· All employees and other staff will receive professional development in any new methodology introduced.

· There are benefits for all stakeholders from adopting the new methodologies.

· There will be not one who will be adversely affected due to the new completion of the project and any new methodology introduced.

Channel: It very essential to consider several channels for communication. For instance, any change by mail is infrequent to be considered effective (Eskerod & Larsen, 2018). Therefore, the communication channels that are deemed effective include meetings, project briefs, video links, teleconference, and one-on-one. In that case, a project manager needs to consider the most instrumental channel for the relevant audience and the message that he/she is trying to convey.

After getting a better understanding of all relevant stakeholders, the key messages that need to be communicated, and the most effective communication channels, the next thing is to develop a communication plan. Below is a table showing an example of putting it all together into a communication plan for the completion of a project.

Key message	Stakeholder	Communication	Channel	Duration
The new methodology for completing the project has an evidence base that provides support to become more superior	Top management, e.g., CEO	Paper that issues the evidence-based research to support the new initiative	Email and face to face	Monthly
	Heads of departments	Presentation to employees demonstrating the new methodology and the progress of the project	Staff meeting	Monthly
	Organizational, professional staff	Technical requirement discussion for the innovation or idea	Meeting	Fortnightly
All employees or group members will receive professional development concerning any new methodology for completing the project	Employees	Plan for training with specific dates and time	Email	Monthly

The communication plan will identify how all the key stakeholders will be communicated with the relevant frequency and medium. The plan establishes the content of communication required by each stakeholder and what it intends to accomplish.

Conclusion

Every stakeholder has his/her own unique needs, which require to be addressed individually. Additionally, all projects have primary stakeholders that need to be identified, and proper communication is a key to ensure all their needs have been addressed appropriately.

Reference

Alsulaimi, A., & Abdullah, T. (2020, March). Management of Stakeholder Communications in IT Projects. In 2020 3rd International Conference on Computer Applications & Information Security (ICCAIS) (pp. 1-6). IEEE. Retrieved from https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9096842

Di Maria, D. L. (2018). Navigating Stakeholder Communications. International Educator, 27(5), 50-52. Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/openview/5c26215a21553e724e21d50f6d29b969/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=44755

Eskerod, P., & Larsen, T. (2018). Advancing project stakeholder analysis by the concept' shadows of the context'. International Journal of Project Management, 36(1), 161-169. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0263786317301114

Jain, T., Aguilera, R. V., & Jamali, D. (2017). Corporate stakeholder orientation in an emerging country context: A longitudinal cross-industry analysis. Journal of Business Ethics, 143(4), 701-719. Retrieved from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10551-016-3074-1