Stakeholder Management is just people management!
But sometimes, specially if this concept is still alien, things can get super confusing and frustrating at the same time pretty quickly.

What is stakeholder management?

While working on any project, there are stakeholders - peoples/entities who have vested interest on the project under developement. Since they won’t be activly building it, it’s still “super” important for them to keep track of what exactly is happening - and perhaphs reprioritize their goals accordingly.

But, this may not be immediately clear, or just not be on the mind of someone working directly on the project - afterall, their goal is to finish what’s been assigned to them, and they may as well be doing it in the best of their ability.

The catch here is that those working directly on the project may not really understand that others, who aren’t working closely, do not have as much of the updates about the project as they have and yet it’s important for them to have those updates. Sometimes, things aren’t very transparent unless explicitly stated.

This is where stakeholder management comes into place.

It is necessary that everyone (or those that need to) on the team has a reasonable amount of idea on what’s really happening, and where the project is being led or who is working on what and what the expected deadline is. Stakeholder management is a way to impart just that.

This makes it immediately clear that stakeholder management is largly about communication, and it indeed is.

Some ways to ensure a proper stakeholder management:

  1. Overcommunicate - this can’t be oversaid!
  2. Provide timely updates
  3. Make sure blockers are informed to the team
  4. Don’t be MIA!

Also,

Having said everything about stakeholder management, it’s also equally important to sought out a balance between communicating and “not communicating”. Providing timely updates is good, but also one should learn to say no, or push back for deadlines if they aren’t achievable.