Hello fellow project managers, business analysts and stakeholders! Welcome to my blog! I am excited to share an important topic with you on providing regular and informative updates to project stakeholders. Hope you find this post insightful!
Your focus as a project manager is executing a project and pushing for activities to finish. You may be doing all the right activities by keeping the project on track. If stakeholders don’t know how things are progressing, you are only doing part of your job! As a project manager, it is critical to communicate to your stakeholders of project progress on a regular basis. There are several ways to do this. Before we jump into the ways of providing project progress, let’s discuss one more aspect. First, I want to emphasize on three key areas that all project managers should address prior to sharing project progress:
Understand stakeholder needs.
- This involves getting to know the stakeholders who are working with you in the project. Some stakeholders prefer to review data every day/week/bi-weekly/monthly. Other stakeholders may like to only read descriptive text and may not be as focused on numbers. It is important to spend time to understand how your stakeholder operates. This includes understanding how they makes decisions and what type of information they needs. Based on this, you can focus on meeting their expectations of delivering value to them and the organization.
Proactively listen to your stakeholders’ concerns
- When you initially start a project, stakeholders may not bring up concerns to you right away. As you establish a strong working relationship with your stakeholders, they will bring up concerns to you. Stakeholders may want to share specific concerns with you in confidence and will rely on you to address potential issues/risks. As a project manager, you may have to adapt how you provide status to your stakeholders. This includes making sure that the project progress status reports or dashboards provide enough detail. Finally, it should also address their concerns without having them ask about it.
Develop and execute a communication plan
- As a seasoned project manager, you may already know what this is. For newer project managers, communication plans provide detailed stakeholder analysis, communication strategy, approach and communication risks. Stakeholder analysis is exactly what the phrase means; it’s an analysis on stakeholders that provides details on who the stakeholder is and the division are they aligned to. The analysis may contain details on how the project will impact them and interest level of the stakeholders. The analysis may contain details on stakeholders’ ability to influence others, and stakeholders’ stance on the overall project. Conducting detailed stakeholder analysis can help the project team best determine who to go for specific types of questions/support. Moreover, it can also help determine how to approach each stakeholder as project team members schedule and conduct meetings with them. The communication plan provides the communication strategy and approach. This focuses on what types of communications to send out to various stakeholders and groups. Finally, it also contains details on how to engage with them based on the project’s needs or requirements.
We have covered the three key pre-requisites before sharing project progress with stakeholders. Next, we will focus on how project progress can be shared:
Utilize online collaboration tools to share regular progress
- The current workforce is working remotely due to COVID-19 and there have been new online tools to work together. With that, it makes sense to utilize online collaboration tools like Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, Asana. Online tools can provide regular progress within a project. An advantage of this approach is that stakeholders have access to go and check the status of the project at any time. Status reports help stakeholders identify any risks or issues; this includes capturing risks or issues that need to be addressed or mitigated.
Send out weekly or bi-weekly status reports
- Sending weekly status reports may be a cliché approach to take. However, it’s one of the most tried and true methods for providing regular updates to stakeholders. A status report contains the overall progress of the project. It includes recent major tasks completed, upcoming milestones within a project and upcoming activities. It will capture key risks and their respective mitigation strategies, key issues and their resolution approaches. The report may capture project financials details and other pertinent key performance indicators that would be relevant to the stakeholders.
Develop and follow a meeting cadence to meet with actively involved stakeholders
- This point refers to meeting with key stakeholders within the project to provide progress. It may not necessarily involve meeting every stakeholder who is involved within the project. It’s important to regularly meet with stakeholders. A project manager can provide project status while also assessing the stakeholders’ in person reactions and feedback. This is useful only if the stakeholders prefer to meet in person on a regular cadence. At times, stakeholders may prefer to receive a copy of the report and look at it on their own time. Some stakeholders have a vested interest in the project (whether through project sponsorship or financially responsible). In these situation, they have a higher interest in meeting in person to understand how the project is progressing.
Define a meeting cadence with project sponsors and senior leaders for steering committee meetings
- Besides meeting/interacting with key stakeholders, it is also critical for project managers to establish and follow a meeting cadence. This is especially critical for meeting with executive leadership on overall project progress. This may be a bi-weekly or monthly meeting where the project manager presents overall project progress. In these meetings, it is important to bring up key issues or risks to organization leaders for their awareness. Leaders will be attentive as they want to make sure they are seeing progress on the project. This is true especially for leaders who have invested their budgets into the project. The status that is presented in these meetings may summarized as compared to what is presented to regular stakeholders. However, it will still be detailed enough for the leaders to take action upon. Preparing for these meetings can be tough as when you may not know all of executive leaders in the organization.
I hope you enjoyed this post! How do you keep your project stakeholders informed of project progress? Leave us a comment below!