Rebles Guide to PM
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How to Balance Work and Festive Season: Productivity Hacks for Project Managers
While some projects might have an end of year deadline, in my experience, most projects finish when they finish. So there’s every chance that your projects, like mine, will run through the holiday period.
We do need to recharge, rest and reset, and so do the people on the team. So how do you balance the pressures of work and leadership’s desire to keep hitting those milestones, over the festive season?
I’ve been project managing for over 20 years and I’ve had to balance my workload with taking time out for family and having a personal life over that time, like we all do. I love Christmas, so I want to be able to celebrate while not worrying about work. Let me share some of my tried-and-tested tips for doing exactly that.
Plan your time
Time feels more limited over the holiday season in the run up to year end because the days are shorter (for us in the Northern hemisphere at least). There’s also:
- Pressure from management to get work delivered before the end of the year for a tidy close
- More people off work
- Children off school (and before that, carol concerts, shows and so on)
- Personal objectives to meet for performance reviews.
Plus, I simply want to end the year knowing I’m in a good place work-wise. So we have to be smart with how we use our time.
Read next: Time management tips for when everything is a priority
Book your time off
If you haven’t used your entire holiday allowance, check to see what time is owed to you and book it.
Encourage the rest of your team to book their vacation days too.
Prioritize your tasks
Set clear goals for what you are planning on achieving, and check in with yourself – is that really realistic? It’s easy to be over-optimistic about how much you can do. Make sure your goals align with people on your project teams.
If you use time-blocking, then double down on that to get through more periods of focus time and blitz your to do list. If you don’t use time-blocking then start! It works for your personal responsibilities too, like batch cooking.
Lean into your project management software, action logs and RAID to stay organized.
Review your schedule
Will your schedule stay true over the holiday period? That’s when IT implements change freezes, colleagues are off and suppliers close their offices.
Review your project plans and double check that your dates are achievable. Plan extra time if you need it.
Watch your stress levels
Burnout, anyone? This is the worst time of year for feeling under pressure as there’s definitely a sense that people are weighing up what they have achieved in the year and wanting to squeeze out a little bit extra. Plus holiday parties – that’s a recipe for expectation and stress.
If mindfulness techniques work for you, great. Personally, I’m more likely to do a yoga or Pilates video from YouTube. Whatever your personal relaxation technique, make the time to fit in something that supports your mental health.
Set boundaries. Only two evenings out a week? No more than 6 guests round at a time? Whatever your personal red lines that will help you avoid overwhelm and stress, make them. For me, it’s writing all the Christmas cards on the first available day of December as then that’s a chore that’s done.
Holidays bring a lot of distractions, so think about what would help you stay the most focused. For me, that’s a To Do list, and delegating holiday chores to family members so we spread the load between us.
Stay on the same page with your team
Keep the communication lines open with your team. Set expectations about when you will be working and when you are off, and don’t check Teams messages, Slack or email while you are out of the office. (Easier said than done, I know.)
Review the project schedules and if things need to move as resources aren’t available, then make those changes as early as you can to manage stakeholder expectations.
Use your email signature to alert people to upcoming leave and then set an out of office message.
Stop asking people to travel. With our November, December, and January weather, the less time you spend on the roads or standing on station platforms, the better. Remember, they’ll want to fit in personal activities as well, and it’s hard to make it to the kids’ end-of-year show or do some holiday shopping if you’ve got to travel back from a job site miles away.
Delegate and outsource
Delegate and outsource: this goes for personal tasks as well as work tasks!
Identify any tasks that can be delegated or outsourced. Now, to do that, you need a reliable support network, so hopefully, you’ve been working on creating that during the year so your team members have the skills they need to pick up work from you and from each other to cover for absence.
It really helps if you have smooth workflows, documented processes, and have got as much as you can automated.
If you are delegating approvals while you are off, make sure the delegate knows how they work and what might be coming through the approval pipeline. When I go away, my manager gets any workflow messages for me so can approve things like purchase order requests on my behalf.
Focus on team morale
Not everyone is a holiday person, but it’s nice to organize virtual or in-person events for the team. It’s a way of recognizing and appreciating the team’s efforts throughout the year, and it’s a bit of a workplace tradition in many places.
That might mean going out for a meal, organizing a potluck or a fuddle, or simply congregating in the kitchen at the office for a glass of something cold and some nibbles.
Set a good example for everyone else: you should be able to have a healthy work-life balance, and that shows people it’s possible. Honestly, I’m not sure that I do, as when things are busy on projects, I work a lot, but I’m pretty good at giving people the impression I’m not drowning unless they need to know!
Work smarter, not harder
Easy to say, not as easy to do. Here are some suggestions for boosting your personal productivity that you can lean into at this time of year but that work all year round.
- Find a productivity app or approach that you love and stick to it
- Put all your Christmas plans and notes in a bullet journal
- Create a conducive work environment at home so you can work away from the buzz and distractions of the festivities
- Balance work tasks with festive activities – it’s OK to make time for fun!
Balancing work and the festive season as a project manager requires careful planning, prioritization, and a strong focus on both personal and team well-being. But isn’t that the job all year round?
Take a deep breath, get yourself organized, and think about how you are going to plan out this hectic time to meet all your commitments. Set realistic goals, actively manage your stress, maintain clear communication with your team, and embrace the support of your colleagues.
The holidays should be a time of joy, and business hours aren’t going to get in the way of that! It might feel like your work-related projects are taking a backseat to family activities or even chores and holiday preparations at home, but that’s most likely the case for everyone.
In this season, spread the holiday spirit and navigate work at home and in the office without sacrificing either your professional responsibilities or your personal time to recharge and celebrate. Happy holidays!
This article first appeared on Rebel's Guide to Project Management and can be read here: How to Balance Work and Festive Season: Productivity Hacks for Project Managers
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KPIs for Project roles
People often ask me how project managers can be evaluated, or what targets should be set for people in project roles.
It’s a bit tricky to provide a one-size-fits-all answer, but I have come up with some Key Performance Indicators for project managers, that you can use as a starting point for your own team.
I find it easiest to start with the ‘why’ of why your team exists. If you don’t have a mission statement or purpose statement for your team, start with that.
Here’s a very generic one that I drafted for a coaching course assignment that you can use as a starting point:
Our vision is to provide project management expertise to enable the organisation to deliver the strategy, driving the right change, at the right time, in the right way, transforming us into an agile organisation.?
OK, on to the KPIs. These are not KPIs for projects – those are however you track project success, so you’ll normally be using measures like cost variance, schedule variance, planned value, cycle time, planned vs actual hours, billable hours etc.
You can track that sort of KPI through your project management software.
But I’m more interested in how you track an individual project manager’s performance. What goals can you set for them that help you compare project managers in a team or assess how well they are doing?
KPIs for Project managers
There are so many ways you could track how well a project manager is performing, but I think it’s quite separate from how the project is going. After all, we can’t always control for all the variables and you’ll probably find that cost, schedule and changes all happen whether the project manager is the best one on the team or not.
- All projects have clearly defined goals
- All projects have benefits clearly identified
- All projects have a defined schedule and project budget
- All projects have a change impact assessment completed for key roles
- All project milestones, risks and issues are documented in the tool
- All completed projects have a closure document that includes lessons learned
If you want to pull up the project management software dashboard at the time of a performance review and check their project’s resource capacity, profitability, CPI, SPI, EV etc etc, then do, but give the project manager a chance to explain why their numbers aren’t the only thing that determines whether they are doing a good enough job.
KPIs for project coordinator
These KPIs could also work for a team coordinator, team PA or other admin role.
- All project meetings are booked within a reasonable time frame (depends on type of meeting)
- All travel requests are booked within a reasonable time frame (depends on requirement)
- Team meetings are booked, minuted, recorded every quarter
- Team org charts are kept up to date (within a week or a team change)
- All communication is professional, proof-read and dealt with in a confidential manner as appropriate.
As you can see, these are less about KPIs in project management and more about how the individual is doing their job.
KPIs for PMO analyst
- All project action logs are updated within 48 hours of status meetings.
- 80% of purchase orders are raised within 48 hours of request.
- All project lessons learned are added to the database within a week of the meeting.
- The project schedule and milestone schedule are kept up to date.
- Promote efficient ways of working by providing support as required to other team members in using the project management software tool efficiently.
- All status reporting is completed in line with the PMO calendar each month.
KPIs for PMO Manager
These measures would also be suitable for someone in a program management role. Adjust as necessary!
- All Tier 1 projects have clear capacity and resource plans.
- Employee engagement is more than 1% above the true benchmark.
- 100% of strategic plan initiatives are signed off at the relevant governance forum.
- All pipeline and in-flight projects are using the project management software tool.
- Programme board packs are prepared and distributed every other Tuesday.
- Lessons learned are identified across the portfolio and used to inform future projects.
You could also add in customer satisfaction (or NPS). I wrote a book about how to do that easily without any reliance on fancy software, and it works really well with internal customers.
This article first appeared on Rebel's Guide to Project Management and can be read here: KPIs for Project roles
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Questioning and listening: Your mentoring power skills
Mentoring, at its core, is talking to other people and sharing your experience. A successful mentoring relationship relies on the mentor (that’s you) being able to ask effective questions and listen to the answers.
In this article I’ll show you how I use effective questioning and active listening, and how you can use them at work to improve your mentoring practice.
Technique 1: Effective questioning
Effective questioning is a learner engagement technique where the question supports the learning goals and encourages the learner to respond in a particular way.
In other words, if you ask better questions, the mentee (or student) is challenged to respond in a particular way and that helps them with their own learning in the moment.
It’s great because it helps you understand the problem more effectively so you can offer constructive feedback, if that’s appropriate.
There are 3 ways that effective questioning can be characterised (Uni of Tennessee):
- Structure: open or closed questions where there is the potential for a range of responses or yes/no answers.
- Cognitive effort: how much effort the student needs to put in to process the question and respond appropriately.
- Directionality: exploratory questions that prompt a wide range of thinking/responses or convergent questions that encourage a topical discussion to get narrower, used depending on the goals of the conversation.
In The Coaching Habit(Bungay Stanier, 2016) the author advises that we avoid asking ‘why’ questions when working with colleagues/direct reports as it can come off as judgemental (“what were you thinking??!”).
Instead, reframe questions to ask them as a ‘what’ question (“what was your goal with that?”).
Cornell University says effective questions are those that are understood by the listener and provide a challenge but aren’t too difficult to answer. If the question is virtually impossible, your mentee isn’t going to get anything out of the exchange, and neither are you.
How I use effective questioning
The point of questioning is to encourage reflection, and I do ask a lot of questions as a mentor. They help me understand the situation so I can properly advise, and help the mentee reflect on what they did/are planning to do in any given situation so they can take the right course of action next.
When I teach group classes, I am trying to avoid asking if there are any questions at the end, as often that puts students on the spot, or they don’t have time to type or frame their question in the time allocated.
I’ll try to collect questions in advance or even make up a few commonly asked questions so I have something to talk about to fill the silence while people come up with questions of their own. I signpost that question time is coming up from the beginning, so people can prepare their questions.
Being able to ask the right questions at the right time helps me, especially if I don’t know a lot about their project, work or department.
While there are some universal truths in office life, a lot of being able to guide someone is situation dependent. Being able to understand the situation and any associated office politics or opportunities for conflict can be helpful in working out a strategy to address a challenge in conjunction with the mentee.
Read next: What you need to know about project management communication
Technique 2: Active listening
Active listening is listening in a way that helps you understand the mentee’s perspectives. Knowing how to listen actively is a skill that you can develop for your professional relationships, and you’ll find yourself relying on this in your mentoring process.
We all know how to listen (even if we don’t do it all the time). But what does active listening look like?
NHS England describes 6 ways to demonstrate that you are actively listening:
1. Define terms
Make sure everyone has the same understanding of jargon. An effective mentor will check in to make sure that the mentee understands what they are saying, and ask questions if they hear a term that they don’t know.
2. Repeat and paraphrase
I use this a lot to make sure I have heard and understood correctly, often using the words that the person used but in a different way, or similar words so it’s not literally repeating what they have just said as that sounds annoying.
Communication skills are so important in so many aspects of workplace life, and building this simple step into your everyday repertoire will help in lots of situations.
3. Don’t interrupt
Make sure people have the time to complete their sentences and their thoughts.
If you have to interrupt because you’ve run out of time in the session, make a note of what topic you were on so you can bring it up again next time.
4. Listen between the lines
This is about looking out for and listening for feelings, assumptions, values, fears etc. I haven’t really reflected before on what this looks like for my mentoring approach, but I do think I’ve become quite good at it over the years.
Also, having children has helped as they are unable to articulate their feelings and I’ve had to pick them up from body language, facial expressions or their choice or words and tone.
5. Don’t rush to fill silences
I talk quickly and I am getting better at leaving gaps. This is something I could work on more. Having a pause allows us both to slow down and reflect, and also to deepen our understanding of the topic at hand.
6. Feedback impressions
The NHS website suggests checking observations with assumptions and gives the example, “If I were in your shoes, I might be thinking…” and then letting them say whether your assumption is correct or not.
This gives you both an out if you’ve misinterpreted the content.
Active listening as a mentor
During my day-to-day role, and while working in my mentoring capacity, I try to demonstrate active listening.
Sometimes, at the end of a session, mentees say that they feel heard. That’s really important to me as it means I have managed to demonstrate empathy and show them that they are not only not alone in their work challenges, but also that their concerns are valid – and that has come across during the conversation.
How I demonstrate active listening
I demonstrate active listening by watching my body language, for example nodding and smiling at the right times, and looking directly at the camera to make eye contact instead of at the screen, as that makes your eyes look like they aren’t directly looking at the person.
It’s particularly hard to demonstrate active listening on camera because I often I do have something else on my screen alongside their face, like the notes I am typing as I go through the call, or their CV or some other relevant document we are looking at together.
I think I’ve got a lot better at almost exaggerating some of the queues that you’d expect to see in person, not so it looks fake, but so that the behaviour is obvious and a clear signal to the other person.
I find it harder to demonstrate active listening when the other person does not have their camera on; fortunately this does not happen that often. If you mentor colleagues who do not have their cameras on, encourage them to change that! Or meet in person.
Taking it further
Questioning and listening are two sides of the same coin and you’ll use them in mentoring sessions and in your own work. Show up with realistic goals and a positive attitude and you’ll find these two skills will help you a lot.
Honing these skills, alongside your emotional intelligence radar, will go a long way towards making you the effective mentor you want to be… even on days where it feels like you haven’t said anything meaningful to your mentees!
This article first appeared on Rebel's Guide to Project Management and can be read here: Questioning and listening: Your mentoring power skills
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Questioning and listening: Your everyday power skills
Project management is a lot of talking to other people and acting on what they say. A successful project manager relies on being able to ask effective questions and listen to the answers.
In this article, I’ll show you how I use effective questioning and active listening and how you can use them at work to improve your professional practice.
Technique 1: Effective questioning
Effective questioning is an engagement technique where the question supports the goals and encourages the respondent to answer in a particular way.
In other words, if you ask better questions, the respondent is challenged to frame their answer in a particular way and that helps them with clarifying their ask or their response.
It’s great because it helps you understand the problem more effectively so you can offer constructive feedback, if that’s appropriate, or plan the next steps.
What effective questioning looks like
There are 3 ways that effective questioning can be characterised (according to the Uni of Tennessee):
- Structure: open or closed questions where there is the potential for a range of responses or yes/no answers.
- Cognitive effort: how much effort the student needs to put in to process the question and respond appropriately.
- Directionality: exploratory questions that prompt a wide range of thinking/responses or convergent questions that encourage a topical discussion to get narrower, used depending on the goals of the conversation.
In The Coaching Habit(Bungay Stanier, 2016), the author advises that we avoid asking ‘why’ questions when working with colleagues/direct reports as it can come off as judgemental (“what were you thinking??!”).
Instead, reframe questions to ask them as a ‘what’ question (“what was your goal with that?”).
Cornell University says effective questions are those that are understood by the listener and provide a challenge but aren’t too difficult to answer. If the question is virtually impossible, your colleague is going to assume you’re trying to trip them up. You won’t get anything out of the conversation, and neither will they.
How I use effective questioning
The point of questioning is to encourage reflection, and I do ask a lot of questions as a project manager.
Questions help me understand the situation so I can properly advise, report, plan or take whatever action is needed.
Using effective questioning in the workplace
Effective questioning is something we can use to make sure we have a full understanding of a situation. It’s a technique that works with people at all levels of the organization, and it’s especially helpful with busy people – the more targeted the question, the more likely it is that we’ll get an answer that helps move the conversation/decision/work on.
I also help people frame their questions in the most effective way, especially if they are asking for something: sometimes, I spend time with colleagues thinking about how we (or they) are going to ask for something or phrase something in a session.
For example, recently I was on a call with a colleague who was drafting an email asking for input to a decision. I suggested he phrase it so it was clear he was asking for blockers/challenges and specific points in comparison to ‘general feedback’ which would not have got us closer to signing off the document.
Benefits of effective questioning
Effective questioning allows project managers to gather crucial information, encourage thoughtful responses, and foster a deeper understanding of project challenges and opportunities. By asking the right questions, project managers can facilitate better decision-making, provide valuable feedback, and support their team's development.
Being able to ask the right questions at the right time helps me, especially if I don’t know a lot about their project, work or department.
While there are some universal truths in project management, a lot is situation dependent, so being able to understand the situation and any associated office politics or opportunities for conflict can be helpful in working out a strategy to address a challenge in conjunction with the mentee.
Technique 2: Active listening
Active listening is listening in a way that helps you understand the speaker’s perspectives. Knowing how to listen actively is a skill that you can develop for your professional relationships, and you’ll find yourself using them time and time again.
NHS England describes 6 ways to demonstrate that you are actively listening:
1. Define terms
Make sure everyone has the same understanding of
jargon . An effective project manager will make sure that they define terms, and will ask questions if they don’t understand an acronym or term used.Because... there is a lot of jargon in project management. If we didn’t listen for phrases we didn’t know and question them, we’d be operating in the dark most of the time!
2. Repeat and paraphrase
I use this technique a lot to make sure I have heard and understood correctly, often using the words that the person used but in a different way, or similar words so it’s not literally repeating what they have just said as that sounds annoying.
3. Don’t interrupt
Make sure people have the time to complete their sentences and their thoughts.
Jan Keck, one of the most experienced facilitators I know (and I was fortunate to do his training a while back) says if you have to interrupt someone (for example, in a meeting where they are going on about something that is not relevant to the discussion points on the agenda), you can say, “Can I pause you there?” instead of ‘stop you there’.
Then simply don’t go back to them – helpful if you are shutting down over-enthusiastic talkers in meetings.
4. Listen between the lines
This is about looking out for and listening for feelings, assumptions, values, fears etc. The higher your emotional intelligence, the easier you’ll find this.
It’s harder to do through a camera, so if you are planning on having highly-charged, sensitive conversations, try to do those in person so you can read body language more easily.
5. Don’t rush to fill silences
I talk quickly and I am getting better at leaving gaps. This is something I could work on more! Having a pause allows you and the person you are talking to a chance to slow down and reflect. Then you might get something even more useful in the next sentence.
6. Feedback impressions
The NHS website suggests checking observations with assumptions and gives the example, “If I were in your shoes, I might be thinking…” and then letting them say whether your assumption is correct or not.
This gives you both an out if you’ve misinterpreted the content, which is helpful when working with very senior stakeholders. You could use, “If I were in your team, I might be thinking…” or, “If I was going to have to use this deliverable, I might be thinking…”.
Active listening as a project manager
On project work, active listening is important as it helps us understand stakeholder opinions and perspectives, and what is not said is as important as what is said, especially in relation to implementing changes.
If I am queued in to what is not being said, or said but not believed, it can help identify areas where more
change management or support is required. Active listening works with all stakeholders, from all backgrounds.Active listening ensures you really understand the perspectives and concerns of stakeholders. It helps in identifying underlying issues, building trust, and demonstrating empathy. You can better anticipate potential conflicts, address them proactively, and ensure that all voices are heard and valued.
How I demonstrate active listening
I demonstrate active listening by watching my body language, for example nodding and smiling at the right times, and looking directly at the camera to make eye contact instead of at the screen, as that makes your eyes look like they aren’t directly looking at the person.
It’s particularly hard to demonstrate active listening on camera because I often I do have something else on my screen alongside their face, like the notes I am typing as I go through the call, or some other relevant document we are looking at together.
I think I’ve got a lot better at almost exaggerating some of the queues that you’d expect to see in person, not so it looks fake, but so that the behaviour is obvious and a clear signal to the other person.
I find it harder to demonstrate active listening when the other person does not have their camera on; fortunately this does not happen that often. If you work with colleagues who do not have their cameras on, encourage them to change that! Or meet in person.
Taking it further
Mastering the skills of effective questioning and active listening is essential for any project manager aiming to excel in their role, and luckily it’s not that hard. You don’t have to do a course or read a book (although you could if you wanted).
You just have to be intentional about how you show up to conversations.
When you do that, these everyday power skills will help you navigate complex situations, build strong relationships, and drive projects to successful completion.
This article first appeared on Rebel's Guide to Project Management and can be read here: Questioning and listening: Your everyday power skills
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The Stakeholder Salience Model and How to Use It
What is the stakeholder salience model?
The stakeholder saliency model was proposed by Mitchell, Agle and Wood (1997). They define salience as:
the degree to which managers give priority to competing stakeholder claims.
Their model looks at how vocal, visible and important a stakeholder is. Those dimensions help you identify the stakeholders who should get more of your attention.
Project stakeholder management and saliency
Project management relies on people: you need the project team to get things done, and that team might include members of different stakeholder groups. It’s common to have a core team of people who work daily (or at least regularly) on the project, and then a wider stakeholder community.
The saliency model is a tool you can use as part of stakeholder analysis, management, and engagement. It’s a way of categorizing stakeholders so you can evaluate the best way to involve them in the project.
There are three elements to consider, which together highlight the saliency of a stakeholder: in other words, how much priority you should give that stakeholder.
The three considerations are:
- Legitimacy
- Power
- Urgency.
Let’s look at each of those.
Legitimacy
This is a measure of how much of a ‘right’ the stakeholder has to make requests of the project.
Legitimate stakeholders can have a claim over the way the project is carried out can be based on a contract, legal right, moral interest, or some other claim to authority.
The strategic management layer in an organization is likely to have a say in how the project proceeds. Key customers or clients are also likely to have high legitimacy.
Power
Power is a measure of how much influence they have over actions and outcomes. Their power could derive from hierarchical status or prestige within the organization, money invested from a particular shareholder, ownership of resources required to successfully deliver the outcome, or similar.
Larger projects are likely to have higher numbers of people with power involved because they tend to attract greater corporate governance and oversight – so the top management likes to know what is going on.
Examples of stakeholders with high power are the sponsor, the CEO and the client.
Urgency
This is a measure of how much immediate attention they demand and how unacceptable a delay in response/action is to the stakeholder.
The expectation of high urgency can result from some kind of ownership, previous experience where urgent action was taken that leads to continued expectations of comparable response times, a time-sensitive problem that creates exposure for the stakeholder, or similar.
For example, how often are they likely to bring you urgent issues? Things that can’t wait?
Again, sponsors, clients and senior management are likely to score highly for urgency. Regulatory agencies and compliance teams might also have the right to demand immediate action.
Together, an assessment of these three elements can tell you how engaged a stakeholder is or will be in the work and how they could influence the project. This is useful information for tailoring your engagement activities and working out with whom to invest your time.
You might be familiar with the classic stakeholder analysis impact and interest grid. Stakeholder saliency is simply another tool for stakeholder classification. Personally, I find impact and interest easier, but the theory of stakeholder salience is worth understanding to deepen your knowledge about what action to take and who to be aware of.How the dimensions overlap
The picture shows how power, legitimacy, and urgency overlap to give stakeholders more or less saliency.
Project managers love a good Venn diagram!
Stakeholders that fall into areas where they have two or three elements of saliency are the ones to be most aware of and to spend the most time with.
Mitchell, Agle, and Wood define these salient stakeholders as follows.
Dominant stakeholders
This group has high power and also high legitimacy to influence the project. An example would be the board of a company. The blend of power and legitimacy means they can act on their intentions, should they ever want to.
They might not spend much time on the project, but you know about it when they want to get involved.
Dangerous stakeholders
This group has high power and also expects their needs to be met with a high degree of urgency. However, they have no legitimate claim over the project.
The researchers point out that project stakeholders in this group, for example, pressure groups can use coercive power and unlawful tactics to draw attention to their interest in the project.
Dependent stakeholders
This group has legitimacy and urgency but lacks real power to influence the direction of the project. An example would be the future process owner who will be responsible for running the activities resulting from the project’s deliverables.
If you work in projects for local governments, for example, you might find that lobby groups, local community groups, or local residents fall into this category.
They have a legitimate claim to influence the project as the outcome is going to impact their environment. They want their views to be heard in a timely fashion. But they don’t really have any power to influence the direction of the work because they are not employed by the contractors.
They are ‘dependent’ because they depend on the power of others to generate action at this time.
Definitive stakeholders
This group meets all the criteria for saliency. They have high power in the situation, they have a legitimate claim over the project and they have a claim to urgency.
For example, your sponsor.
Together this gives them an immediate mandate for priority action on the project. Typically, this situation occurs when a dominant stakeholder wants something done and gains urgency as a result.
Small projects may only have definitive stakeholders: perhaps just you and a manager.
Non-stakeholders
They also define a group of people who don’t meet any of the criteria and are therefore not stakeholders.
I would advise caution when using this label because often you simply haven’t identified them as stakeholders yet – they might be at some point.
There’s also a risk attached to labeling everyone else as non-stakeholders. Perhaps you simply haven’t identified them yet.
Other types of stakeholders
The model does talk about other groups – what happens if someone falls into the bracket where they only meet the criteria of urgency, for example. If you want to look them up, these are:
- Dormant stakeholders
- Expectant stakeholders
- Latent stakeholders.
My personal view is that in a business context, given how little time we have to engage all the stakeholders, it’s better to focus on the individuals and groups who tick two or more boxes. The reality of managing projects is that you simply don’t have the time to go through a consultation process and do the analysis for everyone.
Your choice, though.
How to use the salience model
So what are the practical implications for the model of stakeholder salience?
Understanding stakeholder saliency is useful because it helps you identify how to spend your limited resources. You have limited time, and you can make the most of that by applying different levels of stakeholder engagement to different people.
Stakeholder relationships are time-consuming, so it’s worth investing your energy where it is going to have the greatest effect.
Look through your analysis and identify the individuals and groups who are going to benefit most from your time. Prioritize the definitive stakeholders as they tick all the boxes.
Then look at the other groups. There might be important stakeholders hidden away in other categories. Don’t let the model become a replacement for common sense.
However, remember, stakeholders can move between the categories as the project and the situation evolve.
Power, urgency, and legitimacy can be lost and gained slowly over time, or in a moment. Keep your analysis under review and switch up your actions accordingly, creating a stakeholder management strategy that fully engages your community to the best of your ability.
This is an edited extract from Engaging Stakeholders on Projects: How to harness people power by Elizabeth Harrin (APM, 2020).
Mitchell, R. K., Agle, B. R. and Wood, D. J. (1997) ‘Toward a Theory of Stakeholder Identification and Salience: Defining the Principle of Who and What Really Counts’, The Academy of Management Review, Vol. 22 (4), pp. 853-886.
This article first appeared on Rebel's Guide to Project Management and can be read here: The Stakeholder Salience Model and How to Use It