 So hi everyone, thank you for attending the webinar today. How to successfully build engagement strategies to manage stakeholders. My name is RIT Philips Roy and today I will share with you my experience and learnings as a senior product manager at Tier Mobility and a former product manager at Salando. So first let me introduce the agenda for the webinar. I'll begin by telling you a little bit about myself and my product management experience and then I will talk about what is a stakeholder management and why do we need it. And before we get into the different techniques it is important that we have the right mindset towards stakeholder relationships and adopt an outward mindset towards stakeholder requests. Then I will give you some tips on how to identify and prioritize stakeholders to define an engagement strategy. And finally I will talk about the continuous process of stakeholder management. So who am I? I'm RIT, nice to meet you. I have more than four and a half years of experience as a product manager. I started my product management career at Salando a fashion e-commerce company based in Germany that operates in 17 different countries. And at Salando I've had experience as a model product manager for the Salando app and experience in the economics and experimentation team working on AB testing and causal inference research. I've recently joined tier mobility a micro mobility service provider as a senior product manager in the operations excellence team focusing on safety and maintenance of the fleet and energy network. And with regards to this topic I strongly believe that stakeholder management is a key skill set to have as a product manager. So I do feel very passionate about this topic. So feel free to connect with me via LinkedIn and ask me any questions that you might have and I'm more than happy to discuss this further. So what is stakeholder management? So this is a very textbook definition of stakeholder management which is the systemic identification, analysis, planning and implementation of actions designed to engage with stakeholders and to manage their expectations. So the first step identification stakeholder management is about being aware of who your stakeholders are, right? And in terms of analysis of your stakeholder management you should be asking yourself who you should you focus on and why? And in terms of planning what is important is to get your stakeholders engaged in your project or your initiative and for them to support you. And lastly, implementation, right? Together with your stakeholders you have to work together to enable that you achieve your goals and your milestones. However, more importantly why do we need stakeholder management? So firstly, it's important to know the environment. What does this mean? It means knowing this high level strategy of the company or your organization or business unit. It is important to understand whose interests should be taken into account. Also for you to find out and discover what other projects are running in parallel that could affect your project. And by understanding the environment and knowing your environment you are basically identifying risk issues, changes that will influence your initiative. Second, to rely on others to work. So yeah, I mean we all work with radical collaboration. You need to make sure that everyone has what they need in terms of information, access and to succeed you need people to support and work towards the goals of your project. Third, feedback and support. Feedback from stakeholders is really important to make sure that you're on the right track in case there are changes that you need to be aware of for example. And how good you are with managing your stakeholders will have a positive or negative impact on your project. So it can be quite difficult to get someone to support your project when they are easily putting obstacles in place. So having the support of your stakeholders is super crucial. And one of the key reasons for failure in a project is the lack of acceptance from stakeholders. You also need your stakeholders to help together to define the scope to understand what is feasible in a given timeline. And ultimately we do stakeholder management to have an outcome that is used and useful. And so far as what I've described, stakeholder management sounds like a process that conceptually that we define. However, remember that ultimately stakeholder management is mainly a people thing. And it's important when dealing with people that you adopt the right mindset towards your stakeholder relationship which is basically to adopt an outward mindset. So what is an outward mindset versus an inward mindset? In an outward mindset, we see people as people that we are interested in because other people are important to us. We see their needs, their goals and their pain points and frustration. And when we see and are interested in other people we tend to go about our work activities in ways that are naturally more helpful to others. The opposite of an outward mindset is an inward mindset. And this happens at times when we are maybe too stressed for example and we don't see other people and we are not really interested in their needs and their goals, right? And in these moments people are like objects to us. And when we don't see their needs and their goals then they tend to be, then we are a bit more self-focused and we tend to focus more on ourselves. And while we might be well-intentioned we just don't see our impact on others when we are inward. And because we are not taking others into account this can be a source of conflict when it comes to stakeholder management. So how we deal with other people is really depends on our mindset. When we look outwards and see other people we have an outward mindset. And when we approach work concern on our own needs then we have an inward mindset. And why is this outward mindset important? So instead of seeing stakeholders as objects but instead people with needs and goals it would help us understand and empathize with them better and ultimately helping the working relationship. In this next section I will talk about how to identify and prioritize stakeholders to define an engagement strategy starting with the identification. Stakeholder identification is the basis of stakeholder management. It is the process of finding all the individual groups organization and teams that are affected by the outcome of your project. And here are some ways to go about doing this. You can review organizational assets you can have a brainstorming meeting or you can make a pitch. So firstly what does it mean to review organizational assets? So as a recommendation before you can before you start approaching individuals and teams you should do a little bit of research to see what documentation is currently existing. So for example you can have a search through the company intranet look through project folders for example look through the ticketing system such as GitHub, Confluence, JIRA for example and this will give you input to draft your first stakeholder list by helping you to identify at least the obvious stakeholders. However this might be a bit tricky when this is a completely new area with no precedence and there's nothing that you can refer to. So this is not something that you could always do. Another way to identify your stakeholders would be to gather in a dedicated workshop a brainstorming workshop the core team key contributors and subject matter experts to discuss potential stakeholders. And the output of this brainstorming workshop would be a list of stakeholders based on their role their team, what can their contribution could be for this project, right? You could also send around a questionnaire to identify potential stakeholders. So stakeholders would respond to this questionnaire to tell you how they could possibly be involved or what their needs or concerns could be with regards to this project. Another important exercise is to also look for technical dependencies. So kind of similar to the brainstorming workshop you would conduct a workshop with your potential stakeholders and think about what the final product could be define what the deliverables need to be delivered define milestones and based on this it can give you an overview of alignments that need to happen and also reveal further stakeholders that you might need to reach out to. Another technique is to make a pitch, right? At the beginning of a project you can send out an introductory presentation of the project or any other info you think that is essential for the audience to be aware of. And here you might wanna choose a broad audience to begin with so that you try to miss as few stakeholders as possible. And basically you can ask the audience to subscribe to a newsletter or to a dedicated mailing list to keep receiving information. And you can collect information about those who are subscribing to your mailing list, for example and then find out what role they or their team could have for your project. As a recommendation, use the relevant identification method not all these methods would be suitable and directly reach up to your stakeholders individually to gather more information and you should also update your stakeholder list regularly. Now once you've identified your stakeholders it's time to analyze and prioritize them, right? So who should you focus on and why? Stakeholder analysis is critical in communicating with key stakeholders because as product managers we have more to do than the time that we have, right? So it's super important to prioritize our time and energy when working with stakeholders. So prioritizing your stakeholders will help you know who you should focus on because you don't have the time to address all of their concerns the same way and to help you develop a good understanding of the most important stakeholders and to make sure that you have the relevant people in the room for meeting or to make decisions and you don't want to so that these meetings would be efficient. So how can you classify stakeholders? Here are four points that you can think about. Firstly, how can they influence your project? What is their stake in the project? Their role or their position in the company and what makes them unique for your project? So if you ask yourself these questions and if you use this matrix that you see on the slide here this power and interest matrix based on whether they have high or low power or high and low interest you can classify your stakeholders. So based on where they are placed in the matrix it will tell you who you should focus on. So in the top right quadrant stakeholders with high interest and high power are stakeholders that you should manage closely. Their influence will impact the success of your project and the outcome of your project. So you probably would want to have regular touch points with them. On the other hand, stakeholders who lack availability or interest to be engaged are stakeholders that you probably want to keep satisfied. And stakeholders with high interest but low power are stakeholders that you would want to keep informed. They may want more of your time than you can actually give them. So you might need to find efficient ways to keep them informed. And there are other stakeholders that might fall into the monitor quadrant which you don't need to put so much effort into. Once you've analysed and prioritised your stakeholders you need to define your engagement strategy. So here are some engagement strategies. Having face-to-face meetings especially with your key stakeholders is really important. Given the current situation that we are in in a remote setting, I would say having one-on-ones on a regular basis is super important. Providing a weekly status report this could also be to a larger audience and depends on the way that you decide to communicate whether it's by a written form or whether it's by a presentation for example. It would be stakeholders that would need this information on a regular basis and stakeholders that might not need to know your progress weekly. You could have bi-weekly meetings with them dedicated at-hoc meetings to address specific requests only when they are relevant at certain points of the project and not throughout the whole project. Or just having a centralized business requirement document that everyone has access to in the company and can refer to to understand what this project is, what stage is this project, what's coming up next for instance. As a tip, you can pick any engagement method that you think is suitable based on how you've analysed and prioritised your stakeholders and how much time and effort you should be investing in them. This is the most efficient method based on this. And spend most of your effort on your main stakeholders and sometimes for your main stakeholders the solution has to be tailored. Not everyone likes to receive information in the same way. Some people are happy with an email update or newsletter update but some people want to have that personal update from you. So you really need to tailor your engagement strategy based on how your stakeholder appreciates receiving information and updates. So as I said, use the analysis and prioritization matrix to help you decide on the best engagement strategy. Yes, how to keep your stakeholders engaged. Remind them on a regular basis what the goals of the project is. Show them progress frequently so that people are following you throughout this whole process and they are up to date. Celebrate milestones with them and ensure that their contribution is recognised. So show some appreciation for the work that they've put in and this will also motivate them to continue to support you. If you want your stakeholder management to be successful you have to remember that it is not just the one time process. So what I talked about identification analysis prioritisation and then engagement. This is a continuous process. So once you've gone through the cycle it's important to review what you've done and then repeat this whole cycle again, right? And when should you think about updating your stakeholder management strategy? So here are a few pointers to help you think about whether it's time or not to redo this whole process. So when the scope of your project changes it could mean that you might need other stakeholders that you were not in contact with or you might not need to continue to put in time and effort with the current set of stakeholders that you're already communicating with. When there's a delay or any major blockers in the project, when there's a new project you need to reach a certain milestone and when there are changes to your team and you need to update your stakeholders. To summarise what I shared today, here are some key takeaways. So firstly, adopt an outward mindset towards stakeholder relationships. This will do you a big favour in terms of maintaining good healthy working relationships with your stakeholders. Identify stakeholders and how you can clarify how can you classify your stakeholders by analysing and prioritising them based on the power and interest matrix. As well as I shared with you some techniques to define your engagement strategy. And lastly remember that stakeholder management is a continuous process. So thank you so much for participating today. It was a pleasure sharing my knowledge and experience with you and I'm happy to connect with any of you further. Thank you.