Successful project is one that creates value for stakeholder throughout the project. Yes, it make sense. But, next thing that comes to mind is what does team need to do that creates value for its stakeholders?

Obvious thing, which we all will agree to is that the project team need to understand is what is the purpose, objectives and goals of this project, knowing and understanding those would surely give the team some insight into what stakeholder really values. It then all starts with identifying who project stakeholders are and analyse these stakeholders, who on nearly all occasions have different interests, level of involvement, expectations, needs, and requirements. This needs to be thoroughly analysed and brainstormed to develop stakeholder engagement plan with communication strategies and plan that best suits this plan. These early steps in the project are vital and needs to be followed by implementation through collaboration and early feedback, which enhances transparency and helps in building long term trust and relationship with stakeholders.

Customer engagement, especially for stakeholders who have high interest and are decision makers in project is also crucial that would in turn contribute in creating value for them. But, it also equally important that we are dealing with active stakeholders and thus it is imperative that review of stakeholder register is carried out throughout project and emphases should be on keeping stakeholder register up-to-date with communication strategies tweaked accordingly. All this helps to understand key project deliverables through strong collaboration between team and stakeholders, guides team to better manage risk and stay on track. Clear understanding of deliverables are important and good to create realistic project plan which will create value to customer and where activities and tasks are sequenced to develop those deliverables. Activity sequencing should be such that we have frequent deliveries for customer and provide them option to provide feedback, which can be worked on accordingly. Tweaking things to align with stakeholder expectation and have transparency with stakeholders so that any alerts and concerns are known early in project life cycle and team get sufficient time to react and takes agreed corrective actions.

Here is we leverage collaborative tools can be of real value when all the stakeholders have real time information about the overall project. Emphasis should be on using online collaborative tools which has support various plugins or combination of collaborative tools in order to facilitate strong governance, risk and control. Value creation for stakeholders will bring satisfaction to customers and happy customer’s means more business and more revenue. So overall it is win-win situation for customer and the organization in general.