Stakeholder Relationship Management (SRM) software is designed to simplify and streamline the stakeholder management process by giving teams a centralized and organized space for all their engagement and consultation information.
While your organization may understand that an SRM is the ideal stakeholder management tool for enhancing your stakeholder management efforts, it's not always easy to determine when the right time is to start using an SRM.
In this blog, we'll identify ten common stakeholder management challenges that an SRM is designed to address. If any of these resonate with you or your team, it's time to seriously consider adopting an SRM.
The following are ten common stakeholder management challenges that signify it's time to adopt an SRM software:
The reality is, when you have large amounts of data, managing it can become increasingly difficult. When this happens, it's challenging to make sense of your data, extract insights, understand your stakeholders, and make informed decisions for your stakeholder engagement program.
An SRM is designed to help you manage large volumes of stakeholder information in an organized and simple way, so your information is accessible and understandable, allowing you and your team to be updated on your stakeholders and your projects quickly and easily.
Suppose stakeholder information is scattered in multiple spreadsheets, saved on the team's desktops or scribbled on notes. In that case, you don't have access to everything, which makes it challenging to use, learn, and manage your stakeholder information, leaving your project and organization vulnerable to risks and gaps.
An SRM keeps all your stakeholder information in a centralized and organized space that your team can easily access. This ensures that everyone has access to the data they need, whenever they need it, to pull insights, gain updates, prepare for meetings, run reports, and more.
Explore the 11 benefits of centralizing your stakeholder data →
Efficient teamwork is vital for success, but without a cloud-based system that's easy to use, it's challenging to collaborate with your team on your stakeholder information.
SRM solution:
A cloud-based SRM allows teams to collaborate within the system in real-time. With this capability, you can view all your updated information, understand what your team is working on, and collaborate more effectively. This enables you to keep your team's messaging consistent, ensure goals are being met and work together to decide on your next logical steps.
Missed stakeholder issues have the potential to erode stakeholder trust and negatively impact your organization; therefore, it's essential to track all outstanding problems and work to resolve each one. But what happens if issues can't be resolved until many years in the future, or one gets lost amongst your messy stakeholder information? To avoid these problems, you need a centralized and organized space to monitor stakeholders' issues.
An SRM will ensure your issues are at the front of your mind, so you know information like:
With this information accessible and organized, you and your team are always up to date; you know what's expected of your organization and can work towards resolving each issue on time.
Stakeholder meetings are an opportunity for you and your team to build connections with your stakeholders and collect quality data about their interests, concerns and perspectives, but if you're not prepared for a meeting, you can negatively impact the stakeholders' trust in your organization and miss out on collecting vital stakeholder data for your project's success.
With an SRM, you and your team can access a stakeholder profile, view what has been discussed, tasks associated with that stakeholder, any issues raised, and commitments made, along with any notes logged by your team. With an organized SRM, you can be updated on this information in minutes, which helps ensure that you and your team are always prepared for meetings and can communicate on what matters most to your stakeholders.
If a team member has been the primary contact for a stakeholder and they're switching projects or leaving your organization:
With a centralized SRM, you have a single location for everyone to store their stakeholder information. By choosing a user-friendly SRM that's easy and fast, you'll naturally have a higher user adoption rate, ensuring your team is using the software effectively. When everyone uses the same secure SRM, all your vital data is protected, organized and accessible, so you never have to worry about losing your data if a team member leaves the project because it's already input into your SRM.
Are you unsure about how to transition from spreadsheets to stakeholder relationship management software? Don't worry, we wrote an eBook just for you! 'The Step-by-Step Guide to Say Goodbye to Spreadsheets' walks you through the process of switching from spreadsheets to SRM software.
Like issues, if you miss a commitment, you're likely to lose stakeholder trust and impact your organization's reputation.
Using an SRM with a commitments management module ensures that you and your team understand all your commitments, including the associated communications and who they're connected to within your organization. With easy access to this organized information, you can be sure that you'll never miss or forget it again.
Learning more about how an SRM helps you manage stakeholder commitments →
When people don't enjoy a system, find it confusing, clunky or frustrating, they won't use it. When your team doesn't use your system, you can't rely upon your data, which defeats the purpose of effective stakeholder management.
Choosing an SRM designed with stakeholder-focused workflows means you're using software specifically designed to manage stakeholder information. Additionally, by utilizing a user-friendly SRM with an excellent customer support team, your team's user experience will be enjoyable, fast, and easy, ensuring that everyone who needs to use the system can do so with confidence.
You can't be sure about your stakeholder management efforts or make strategic decisions in your stakeholder engagement plans without a way to measure what you've been doing with the ability to pull insights, trends and observations from your organized stakeholder data.
An SRM with a robust reporting system will enable you to generate reports on your stakeholder information, allowing you to see what's. These reports are organized and easy to share with your teams, managers, and stakeholders, so everyone knows what has been said, what has been done, and what the next logical step is in your engagement efforts. Beyond reports, an SRM with dashboard analytics will give you and your team quick updates and important overviews.
Expectations are changing, particularly when it comes to reporting on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), as well as community consultation. To meet reporting requirements and these changing expectations, can you show complete records of:
With all your stakeholder information logged in a centralized SRM, you can create concise and valuable reports. With this ability, you can demonstrate how you and your team have been working to meet expectations and requirements. Even if you need to "run a report on everything," there are SRMs on the market that can run these comprehensive reports in minutes so that you can meet expectations on time.
Not every SRM on the market offers the same features or the same support. SRM software that might work well for one organization might be a poor fit for another, so you need to do your research once you're ready to select an SRM.
To help you do this research, we've developed a free comprehensive checklist of features to look for when you're researching SRM options. To download the free checklist, click the image below!