How to manage website project stakeholders

Quick tips

  • Ensure a stakeholder management & communications plan is in place
  • Allocate stakeholder management responsibility to a member of the project team
  • Educate and inform stakeholders regularly
  • Deal with difficult stakeholders appropriately, don't let them hijack the project
  • Balance the perceived requirements of the business with the real needs of your customer

Introduction

Stakeholder management can quickly become the weakest area of a website project once other more pressing and interesting demands are placed on the team. For the purpose of this article, a stakeholder is anyone inside the business who is involved with, or will be impacted by a web project. You'll need to keep them happy, educate them, document their requirements, handle requests for change, deal with unrealistic demands, control scope creep, and finally train them how to manage the end product. Stakeholder management is a crucial element of any website project, especially as the success of a project will be largely determined by the perception inside the business.

The project manager needs to balance internal stakeholder requirements and ensure these cater for customer expectations and needs. If individuals have direct experience with the original website, listen to them carefully and be prepared to make changes based on their feedback. On a daily basis you'll engage with the business much more than you'll talk to customers, so there is an immediate risk of a skew towards the demands of employees. To ensure the project stays on the right track, an intimate knowledge of your customer is essential and their needs should be aggressively pursued.

Ensure you have a friendly but persuasive member of the team to keep on top of this. Build a stakeholder list and try to reduce numbers where possible - build a representative council if necessary to cater for large groups of similar individuals. Once you have completed the list, determine the extent to which each person needs to be involved with different aspects of the website, and clearly communicate their involvement back to them. Ensure everyone on the list can dedicate sufficient time to the project, or quickly find a replacement. A RACI matrix is a good method of formalising any decisions that are made in this area. Make use of helpful stakeholders and use them as evangelists for the project. If you get a few people on your side this will help dramatically when any convincing needs doing.

To determine the best way to deal with any stakeholder first make an assessment of their knowledge of a. website projects in general and b. what a business website consists of. People tend to sit somewhere along a sliding scale, some described below.

Dealing with difficult stakeholders

1. The naive director / senior manager

"A [friend / creative agency] made an entire [blog / microsite] in two weeks - it isn't difficult"

The friend almost certainly used one of the countless open source blogging platforms or content management tools, or built something not very good using an HTML editor. A cheap Wordpress site, although very capable in many ways, becomes less relevant for large multi-national businesses. [Think security, multiple languages, asset management, integration with business systems, helpline etc]. It can be hard for people to get their heads around how complex a corporate website project can be and you'll need to educate them.

2. Stakeholder with little or no understanding of online consumer behaviour

"Visibility in Google doesn't matter, if I want to find something I'll keep going until I get there"

3. The traditional marketer

"We'll just republish all our brochure content online"

4. The stakeholder with conflicting requirements

"Sales should take priority over customer care - without sales we have no customers"

These are the people who will make your life most difficult, educate them and prevent them from making knee jerk decisions until they understand the consequences.

So who can you trust to make your life easier?

  • People with the right experience with similar projects
  • People who understand how tough a big web project can be (look for grey hair, head in hands)
  • People who are quick to learn and innovative
  • People who continuously read up on modern web technology