1 Key Outcome Your Key Stakeholders Can Help With on Your Project

The purpose of this article is to cover how to launch your best steering committee to put your project on a successful trajectory, and get your charter built at the same time.  The Steering Committee is covered under the project items of Roles, Organization, Stakeholders, and Communications under LEAD, and under People in the MPM model.

The Steering Committee is covered under Roles, Organization, Stakeholders, and Communications under LEAD, and under People

Key Stakeholders and Your Charter

Stakeholders are very critical to the success of your project, especially Key Stakeholders, so use their input to create a good, working charter, and launch your project on its best trajectory. 

To summarize, from another article that covered working with stakeholders.

• Key Stakeholder: Someone who is going to be actively involved in the project.  
• Key stakeholders are those who have more time allocated to help your project and your best interests.  
• This set of Key Stakeholders is extremely valuable, and you need them.  Keep them informed, appraised, and not surprised and they will have your back.
• They form your initial steering meeting who helps you with your charter.

Create Your Charter with the Steering Committee

Circulate the draft of your charter to your stakeholders and gather their feedback and answer their questions.  

You can get feedback most effectively by a key stakeholder meeting, either physical or by conference call, and walk through the charter.  

When everyone is present and walking through all of the pieces of the charter this naturally facilitates covering all of the questions together; and you get good collaboration and feedback from a group discussion. 

Engage key stakeholders to build your charter

It might take you more than one meeting to review with stakeholders due to the changes that come out of each session. 

Suggested steps to first engaging your stakeholders and getting your charter built are:

• Prepare a draft of the charter
• Circulate to Key Stakeholders
• Have a meeting to discuss, and make sure everyone has time to talk and give input
• Publish a new draft, with a covering email listing changes discussed in the meeting – give them 3 days to review
• You’ll get more feedback, but it can be just by email
• Publish the 2^nd draft and circulate – give them 3 days to review
• You may get one last round of feedback, but again by email or you could get a call from individuals to clarify points
• Hold one final meeting where you walk through everything, then do a final version within a day, send it out to everyone again, and then the project is good to go.
• You can get through the cycle in about two weeks if you publish your approach and dates ahead of time.  Make sure you schedule all your meetings and feedback windows on your first meeting, so you set expectations about the end state to bring closure in the time frame you need. 

This can become your first pattern for your Steering Meetings.

Now You’re Good to Go

At the end of the exercise moving the charter from draft to final, you have achieved initial engagements with my Key Stakeholders. 

You have all of their first questions about the project answered from all of them, and you have an approved charter, and your project is ready to roll.

Summary

Stakeholders are very critical to the success of your project, especially Key Stakeholders.  Keep them informed, aware and not surprised so they have your back.

Engage your Key Stakeholders through initial Steering Committee meetings to help you build your charter.

Action Steps / Apply This Knowledge

1. Review your list of current key stakeholders and ensure you can confidently answer the questions from the article on Working with Stakeholders in the way they would answer them.
2. If the answer to 1 above is no, then communicate with each individual key stakeholder to get their answers to the questions.
3. If you have a large discrepancy you may need to update your charter and have a meeting or call (hopefully one will do it) with your key stakeholders, re-issue your charter and get their approval.

Learn More

In an upcoming workshop, for which you can subscribe to be notified when it’s available, we cover project management examples in detail.  

Also, in the workshop, we go into greater depth on many of the project management items in the MPM model.  As well you can ask questions about any of your current projects during the Q&A. 

LEAD - Steering Committee Launch 

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