Stakeholder Management – Top 3 Tips for effective management

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Managing a whole range of different stakeholders is an art, and one that is difficult to master. In project management there is simply no margin for error: getting things right first time and every time is a prerequisite for success. To help you manage your project stakeholders like a pro, here are our top three tips. We’ll explain how you can connect MeisterTask with enform.io to send progress reports to stakeholders: slash meeting times, keep everyone aligned on current objectives, and increase transparency today.

Stakeholder Management – Top 3 Tips for effective management

What is Stakeholder Management?

A stakeholder is anyone involved in a project who has an influence over or interest in the outcome. Broadly speaking, there are two categories of stakeholder: internal and external. Internal stakeholders are people or groups within an organization, such as the project team, project manager or project owner. External stakeholders might include external clients, end users, partners or suppliers.

When projects fail, it’s often because the interests and requirements of project stakeholders are overlooked. As a project manager, you need to ask yourself one basic but very important question at the start of every project: “What can I do to help the people with the biggest influence on the outcome of my project?” To determine and fulfill the needs of your project stakeholders, your planning and communication strategies need to run like clockwork.

Stakeholder management is the process of managing the expectations and requirements of everyone involved in a project. Get it right by giving everyone the information they need, when they need it, and you’ll spend less time putting out fires and free up time to focus on what matters.

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Effective Stakeholder Management With MeisterTask and Enform.io

Managing stakeholders is a delicate balancing act and a skill that’s often underestimated. We’ve listened to our teams and customers to come up with our top three tips on how to manage stakeholders effectively using MeisterTask and enform.io.

1. Clear Roles + Clear Responsibilities = Ultimate Transparency

How do you help managers keep stakeholders and clients up to date? It all comes down to data, transparency and automation.

Luke Grimstrup, founder of Enform.io

Managing stakeholders becomes tougher with each new person involved. Put yourself in their shoes and look at your project. Would the following be unclear?

  • What is my role in this project?
  • What are my responsibilities?
  • What does the project manager expect of me? 

If yes, your team could get sidetracked by irrelevant or repetitive questions. Focus shifts toward tasks that aren’t your team’s responsibility, or people are given access to sensitive information they shouldn’t be dealing with. Either way, this lack of transparency is a huge problem.

If you can define clear roles and responsibilities for project stakeholders early on, you will prevent misunderstandings down the line. Making sure everyone knows what they have to do, when, means you can keep your project on track, avoid delays and prevent project costs from spiraling. MeisterTask is the perfect tool for effective stakeholder management, helping you define who does what, when. For example, you can define external stakeholders as commenters, which means they can view projects and comment on tasks but cannot modify either in any way.

Roles and permissions are included in MeisterTask Business. They can help you to collaborate effectively and keep sensitive data safe and secure.

This helps solve the transparency issue. You can control what stakeholders can view, access and edit in your project. Everyone who participates in a task is automatically added as a watcher, which is a great way to stay updated on the progress of a project. Whenever a task is altered, updated or changed in any way, watchers are automatically notified: the best way to optimize collaboration, keeping everyone on the same page.

Assign guest roles to work with external collaborators while protecting sensitive project data. Learn more about the guest role in this blog post.

2. Communicate Better, Stay on Task

Teams generally don’t need more communication, but better communication. If your project relies on email and chat tools to communicate updates, inbox swamps and missed updates are never far away. With MeisterTask, you can avoid message overload and keep project communication centralized: Comments and mentions keep everyone informed where the action happens – right on the task. You can:

  • Keep task-specific information and requirements in one place.
  • Track the status of ongoing projects easily.
  • Speed up the flow of information.

You can also attach files and images to tasks to save you trawling through emails or hard drives. MeisterTask saves you time by eliminating back and forth emails and messages, and also allows you to reduce the length and the frequency of meetings significantly.

Keep all of your project collaborators on the same page. Learn more about the basics of task management.

The best part? MeisterTask is so intuitive that once you’ve onboarded your stakeholders, you can start putting your plans into action straight away. Simply divide your project into tasks and start communicating like a pro.  Add enform.io to the equation and you can take communication to another level, pushing information to stakeholders on a regular basis via email or Slack.

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3. Custom Reports for Increased Transparency

Have you ever hit a roadblock because you’re simply not getting the vital information you need? Do you find yourself waiting for others to complete tasks before you can move on? Perhaps you don’t have access to the reports you need because they’re in someone else’s hands. Being dependent on others can be extremely frustrating: detrimental to team collaboration and good stakeholder management.

Learn more about gaining insights into your projects and making data-driven decisions in our blog post on the MeisterTask reports feature.

Fortunately, we’ve got the answer. MeisterTask Reports offer a great way to monitor productivity and project progress, adding a statistics-driven element to project management. You can use reports to analyze, track and gain valuable insight into project performance and keep stakeholders up to date on progress. MeisterTask allows you to generate quick or custom reports so that information is tailored to the precise needs of your stakeholders.

Enform.io allows you to take things a step further by connecting outputs to business objectives. Build trust with your stakeholders by providing them with transparent, data-driven updates. Keep your team focused, engaged and motivated by demonstrating the impact of their work on overall project success.

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Why You Need Enform.io + MeisterTask

You might not be familiar with enform.io, but if you’re a project manager, it’s something you’ll want to add to your toolbox. The platform helps organizations centralize vital information that can be shared with stakeholders in the form of meaningful, visual progress reports on objectives and key results (OKRs). Transparency can be greatly increased by sharing reports with stakeholders on a regular basis.

At Meister, we know the value of being able to report on progress and keep stakeholders up to date on project performance at a glance. This is where the enform.io + MeisterTask integration comes in. Once you’ve connected enform.io with your favorite task management tool, you can link your teams to particular MeisterTask projects and set up how often digests are shared. Your stakeholders will appreciate being kept in the loop and you’ll be able to increase the transparency of your projects and boost collaboration.

Learn about the benefits of the enform.io + MeisterTask integration straight from the source’s mouth. Meister Partner Luke Grimstrup explains the setup and summarizes the benefits here.

Manage Stakeholders More Effectively With MeisterTask

Effective stakeholder management doesn’t have to be difficult. Particularly with enform.io and MeisterTask in your toolbox. Why not try out the integration for yourself? 

If you’re looking to boost collaboration, streamline communication and boost productivity, MeisterTask has all of the features you need. Adding enform.io to the mix allows you to share meaningful progress reports with your stakeholders and keep them up to date on project performance at a glance. 

Learn how your choice of collaboration tools affects stakeholder engagement in this blog post.

If you’re using MeisterTask already, you’ll know how intuitive it is and you can master your stakeholder management straight away. If you’re new to MeisterTask, you can be up and running in less than an hour. Give your stakeholders access to visual dashboards and the information they need to stay up to date and deliver their best work.

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