Driving clarity in stakeholder management
Stakeholder management is the art of managing expectations. Each stakeholder has a different needed set of goals for the project, and their point of view will vary from others. The communication plan helps you draft ways to communicate that span the different needs of your stakeholders.
There are two aspects to setting up a good communication plan: defining the types of communication you need and discovering who your stakeholders are. We’ll cover the different types of communication first, as this is usually done only once at the company or team level and is reused from project to project, with only minor modifications. The list of stakeholders will vary for every project, depending on who the stakeholders are, and may require minor tweaks to the communication types.
Table 7.1 lists the different communication types that are common across the industry along with examples of recurrences, owners, and distribution methods: