Communicate with

Stakeholders
Throughout your project’s life cycle, you need to update stakeholders on
progress and problems. Find out how to keep them informed—so they don’t get hit by
unpleasant surprises.
13 Minutes

Benefits

Communicating with your project stakeholders—your team

members, the project sponsor, and anyone else with an
interest in the project—is critical during all four phases of the
project management process. Through ongoing
communication, you keep stakeholders apprised of how the
project is progressing, what problems you’re encountering, and
how you’re dealing with those problems. Regular
communication also maintains project team commitment and
ensures ongoing support from your project sponsor and other
stakeholders.

Make a Connection

Think about a project where clear communication with stakeholders led to its success. How did
the team communicate with stakeholders?
Due to privacy considerations, please record your answers separately and
mark when you've completed the task.

Launch meeting

Face-to-Face Launch Meetings

The launch meeting is a key method for communicating with and motivating your project team.
The launch meeting ideally is held at the beginning of the implementation phase. You and your
project team will have discussed the project extensively and engaged in detailed planning before
the launch meeting during the buildup phase. But there’s no substitute for a face-to-face
gathering attended by all team members. Be sure to include the project sponsor.

Physical presence at this meeting has great psychological value. This is particularly true for
geographically dispersed teams, whose members have few opportunities to convene as a group.
Being together at the very beginning builds commitment. It also bolsters each participant's sense
that the team and project are important.

During your project launch meeting:

 Define roles and responsibilities.

 Review the project charter.
 Seek unanimous understanding of the project charter.
 Have the project sponsor explain why the project's work is important and how its goals
are aligned with the larger organizational objectives.
 Outline the resources that will be available to the team.
 Describe team incentives.

Team meetings

Meetings are often the best way to communicate information

throughout all phases of a project. During meetings, project
team members can share ideas and make decisions. To make
the most of meetings, stick to a regular schedule as much as
possible. If people know that project team meetings take place
every Monday from 3 to 4 p.m., they can plan their other
responsibilities around those times. Having a regular schedule
also saves meeting organizers the frustrating task of finding a
time when everyone is available.

Progress reports

To manage your project team, create progress reports that

track all the work that's being done on your project. File
progress reports in an orderly way that makes them accessible
to whoever needs the information.
Suppose you're overseeing the development of a new product line. You write a progress report
that updates team members on the R&D testing that’s under way, the marketing specialists'
survey findings on customer needs, and the financial analysts' latest forecasting of projected
revenues.
Regular updates

Project stakeholders want continuous updates, status reports,

and progress reports. So establish a plan to regularly
communicate with your project’s key stakeholders. For
instance, hold a monthly meeting supplemented with weekly
status reports.

When you meet with stakeholders:

 Identify project goals.

 Alert stakeholders of changes in the project's objectives
and the consequences of those changes in terms of
quality, time, and costs—then verify that they accept
responsibility for those consequences.
 Clarify assumptions about projected costs and completion
dates.
 Get feedback on the project management process after
the project is completed.

In communicating about the project with stakeholders, don’t

downplay or hide problems that have come up. If you do this
and the problems sabotage the project in your stakeholders'
eyes, you'll be in more trouble than if you had alerted
stakeholders in the first place.

A Roadmap to Better Project Management

In 2010, we at Mindtree won a very prestigious contract for the government of India,
a very transformational initiative, which was to provide 1.2 billion residents with
unique identification numbers. This is something like the social security number in the
United States. A unique identification number in India did not exist, and, hence, this
was a very transformational initiative.
A project of this pace had a lot of challenges from a project management and a project
execution prospective. For example, there were a whole lot of requirements that
continuously came up, which needed to be built and tested. There were also multiple
stakeholders spread across multiple locations. And every stakeholder wanted their
requirement to be implemented first.

We had a team of about 200 engineers and we were working around the clock,
working long hours and/or extended duration. But despite having such a large team,
we were unable to move at the pace that the stakeholders expected. As the leader of
my team, I felt responsible for correcting the situation and bringing down the tension.
In a moment of courage, one day, I walked to the office of the mission director and
proposed to him and sought his help that we needed to manage and set expectations. I
proposed that we build a centralized list of requirements, where the stakeholders can
contribute. And we used that centralized list as the roadmap for implementation. He
saw the seriousness in my face and gave his blessings for me to propose what I
thought was appropriate. I think that changed the tide for us.

And everybody rallied behind the list. The stakeholders prioritized the list. The
product management team defined what the requirements were. The engineering team
knew what to build. And the testing team what to test. And clearly, from a release
cycle perspective also, it became very easy to manage.

We were able to use the centralized priority list to communicate progress in a very
factual way and consistently. Over a period of time, through this process, we built a
system that generated finally about 340 million unique identification numbers for the
residents by the time we finished the project.