You’re in charge of stakeholder management. How do you choose the right tools for your team?

First, to select stakeholder management tools as a project manager is based on your project's specific needs. One can consider factors like project size, team collaboration requirements, and features offered by tools such as communication platforms, project management software, and stakeholder analysis tools. It is also important to tailor your choice to enhance communication, collaboration, and overall stakeholder engagement throughout the project lifecycle.

In my experience, when choosing communication tools for stakeholder management, assessing the team's preferences is crucial, consider the complexity of the project, and prioritize tools that facilitate clear and efficient communication. For example, project management platforms, email, video conferencing, and collaborative messaging apps. Ensuring the selected tools align with stakeholder preferences to promote transparent communication for successful project outcomes is the aim.

It is usually the enterprise tool that is allowed for internal and official communication. For meetings it could be MS Teams, Zoom, Slack and depends completely on what the organization has provided you access to. The email communication could be through MS Outlook or Gmail set up if available. Make sure you don't communicate through informal channel and in any way you are sharing information on these channel as it could be breach of confidentiality which could led to security incidents. Chose your tools as per the available company policy and guidelines to connect with the senior stakeholders and not never take a decision under pressure or in fear of missing a deadline which is against the policy.

To choose the right stakeholder management tools, I prioritise functionality, usability, and scalability. I involve my team in the selection process, ensuring alignment with our workflow and needs. We assess tools based on their ability to facilitate communication, track engagement, and analyse stakeholder data effectively. Additionally, I consider factors like integration capabilities and cost to ensure seamless adoption and long-term viability.

Implementing the best stakeholder management tool can be challenging. In my current job, we made sure that we allow our stakeholders to choose the right tool form them from the tools available. We took into account their needs, preferences and expectations to manage their engagement. Is this tool you are considering going to be able to engage with your different type of keyholders groups (such as internal vs external, high vs low influence, or formal vs informal) on the level that is needed (monitor, keep satisfied, keep informed or closely managed)? Making sure that they can work, engage, collaborate and achieve the vision is key. We must always ensure that tools must support your work and your stakeholders not the other way around.