PMcrunch

In thinking about shareholder management or investor management, especially in today’s volatile environment, I see a big parallel with stakeholder management.  In essence stakeholders are the investors in our projects.  Stakeholders hold a “stake” in our projects.  Stakeholders, just like investors, have different levels of investment or interest in our projects.  We must think of our stakeholders as shareholders in our project management objectives.  Let’s delve deeper into this concept.

In the realm of investor management, there is a set of communications that is required.  Here are some of the key aspects of this shareholder or investor communications: 

1. Establish trust 
2. Provide the information needed
3. Provide information on a timely basis
4. Emphasize transparency in communications
5. Focus on medium and longer term issues

What hits me is that these are in essence the same things that we need to be concerned about on our projects. 

In a McKinsey podcast on investor management, the key principle emphasized, as a result of extensive research of this topic among many companies, is that the investors need to be segmented.  Similarly, it is a good idea to segment our stakeholders on our projects, and of course, this becomes more important the bigger the project and the larger the number of stakeholders.  With segmentation, we can determine what kind of communications, how much regularity, and how much personal touch must be employed in these communications.  Another key factor here is that we need to think this through up front, and systematize our stakeholder management and communication efforts, so we can truly focus on the project, and the need to spend minimal effort on stakeholder communications while we’re in the execution phase. 

Listening to the above-mentioned McKinsey podcast inspired this post.  And, like so many things, it involves borrowing ideas and concepts from completely different areas and applying them in the project management space.  I think there is a great parallel between investor management and stakeholder management.  While the biggest difference is typically the number of stakeholders versus the number of investors – I think there are many more similarities.

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John Reiling, PMP
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