How to Deal with Internal Stakeholders…

For many web strategists’ much of your effort won’t be dealing with users or your web team of developers and designers but with internal stakeholders. ……

How to Deal with Internal Stakeholders…

For many web strategists much of your effort wont be dealing with users or your web team of developers and designers but with internal stakeholders. ……

[...] How to Deal with Internal Stakeholders (tags: projectmanagement) [...]

[...] A step beyond that is Jeremiah Owyang wrote a post on How to Deal with Internal Stakeholders. [...]

[...] How to Deal with Internal Stakeholders (tags: social media project management enterprise) [...]

[...] How to Deal with Internal Stakeholders Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang continues to pump out amazing posts and this one is no exception. In this post, he shares many tips on how to leverage the power of your company’s stakeholders (internal customers) to maximize your social media and web strategy efforts. [...]

I am not for more meetings either haha! It used to be DAILY. Lately I try to have one actual meeting and then the second scheduled meeting of the week I type up an agenda as an update from the last meeting and beat the call to the punch with an email. Then the call ends up being like 10 minutes instead of 40.

I agree, creating a ticketing system is a good idea, Ill append this to the post and credit you.

I’m not however for more meetings, couldn’t this update be done in an email or internal blog?

One of the things that works well for me with stakeholders is that we have a great project management system using http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/. I can submit a ticket and be the ‘reporter’ and provide a description and category that the request should be under. Then provide a brief flow of what it is that my team is looking for from stakeholders and what technical skill sets are needed to complete the project. I also submit a tentative deadline. I attach all assets and documents relating to the project and I can either assign the project to someone who oversees development or assign it to a project manager who can best determine who to assign the task to. What’s great about the process is that the time line of the project is all captured in one thread. All stakeholders are added as ‘watchers’ and can see developments as they happen. Later on even months down the road there will always be a transcript of how the project went down. Much better to me than conference calls and email threads. I often find myself being the guy training other stakeholders how to jump on board and take advantage of new tools and technologies like the project management tool we use but to me it is an investment into making everyone’s life easier and keeping all stakeholders on the same page. There is nothing worse than coming to the conclusion of a project and somewhere along the line a disconnect happened and a key stakeholder is not in the loop on a decision that was made.

Secondly my team has a twice weekly conference call where we report everything we are currently working on and what we are planning including links to all open tickets for project in the management system. Notes are taken and the minutes are sent up to the key stakeholders for review. Thsi is also where myself and team discuss all new ideas, leads, and technologies we are thinking of implementing into our social media projects.