Monitoring Stakeholder Involvement

Project Monitoring and Control (PMC) Specific Practice (SP) 1.5 states "Monitor stakeholder involvement against the project plan." Our organization has chosen to implement this practice by creating a Stakeholder Management Plan (SMP) for each project. The SMP lists each stakeholder, their involvement, the monitoring method, and other pertinent information. Stakeholder involvement is checked during each activity and we do not see any value to having an overt and separate check of the SMP activities by the Project Manager (PM).

1. PMC SP 1.5 specifies that a periodic review of the status of stakeholder involvement. How often should this review occur?
2. What are examples of Direct and Indirect Evidence for PMC SP 1.5 that can be used to help us develop the PMC PIID?

The purpose of PMC is to provide an understanding of the project’s progress so that appropriate corrective actions can be taken when the project’s performance deviates significantly from the plan. Since the Stakeholder Management Plan is one of the components of the project plan, it must be monitored, controlled, and managed on a regular basis in order to take appropriate corrective action. As PMC is normally a PM’s responsibility, it is expected that the PM is regularly monitoring the SMP and its use, but this responsibility can be delegated.

As the stakeholders specified in the SMP are involved in different activities and at different times throughout the project’s life cycle, specifying a fixed monitoring frequency for the entire plan may not provide a lot of value to the PM and the project. It may make more sense to monitor stakeholder involvement against the SMP on an individual activity basis. One method for implementing this type of monitoring would be to specify in the SMP the monitoring frequency for each stakeholder activity, the person responsible for monitoring each activity and stakeholder involvement, and the mechanism for documenting and communicating the monitoring results for each activity. Providing this information in the SMP would then indicate what would be appropriate Direct and Indirect Evidence for a SCAMPI appraisal.