Started to engage with stakeholders, particularly the most important to your stakeholders during definition stage in negotiating what's in what's out of scope and what quality standards are required, and what resources are available. However, it is in the planning stage that you really turn up the level of focus that you place on your stakeholders. Now, stakeholder engagement is a whole topic in itself. So we're only going to touch on it reasonably likely in this video series. But it is critical because your project success is almost entirely dependent upon the perceptions of your stakeholders if they perceive your project, to be failure, that's a failure, because they won't adopt the new processes, they won't buy the products that you've created. So stakeholder engagement is critical.

During the planning phase, you need to continue to engage with stakeholders, while building up detailed plans of how you will engage with stakeholders throughout the planning and delivery stages. stakeholder engagement as a process has four very simple stages. And Stage One is to identify who your stakeholders are. You can't do anything you know they are. And the best way to do it that I know is to simply gather a group of colleagues around ideally colleagues with different backgrounds, different experience different expertise, so that they see the world in a different way. And use that diversity to just name and identify as many stakeholders as anyone can think of a brainstorming process.

Get them all down more stakeholders you can identify the better. So for that purpose, I would take the broadest possible definition of what a stakeholder is a stakeholder is anybody with any interest in your project, they may be affected by the project, they may be able to affect the way the project proceeds. Now, because the number of stakeholders you're likely to have is large, it helps if you do more than more in a project many projects to keep a list of the stakeholders as a checklist. Once you've identified your stakeholders, the next step is to analyze them. What do we know about them? How do we contact them?

What's their preferred means of communication? What do they think what's important to them? What do they need? What are their priorities? How much do they care? how influential are they?

How much power have they got, the more we can Know about our stakeholders. Or the more, we can draw inferences that we can later validate about our stakeholders, then the more richness we can bring to the third step, which is to plan our approach for engaging with. When we planned our approach, engaging with them was only one thing left to do, which is to put our plans into action. Now, it would be marvelous. If we could go through those four steps, and it worked every time. It won't.

So having taken action, we then move back and review, we analyze the outcomes of the action we've taken. We compare it to what we hope to gain from the engagement and if we didn't get what we need. Then we make new plans and take further action and it's that cycling around that analyze plan action Analyze plan action loop, very similar to the plan, do review loop of the Deming cycle. That's the secret to success. In the next lecture, we're going to look at a simple way to analyze your step one