Each industry is unique when it come to stakeholder management. Investing time to define your organization’s business objectives related to the collection, management, and reporting of stakeholder information is essential in order to get started.
Ask yourself:
- What are your primary business reasons for purchasing stakeholder management software?
- Conform to industry and government regulatory requirements?
- Reduce costs related to stakeholder administration and reporting?
- Data security?
2. What do you need to understand about your stakeholder management software options?
- Does the vendor offer excellent support and immediate service?
- How compelling are the vendor’s testimonials/reviews?
- What reporting capabilities are available?
- Does the vendor have customers similar to you?
- How customizable is the solution?
- What kind of client support is available during implementation, and ongoing?
We can help you define your needs and understand what to look for.
Download our FREE Stakeholder Management Software Guide now.
Take a look at these 5 important factors when choosing a stakeholder information management system:
1. Scalability
Does the platform grow to match your organization’s future needs? Make sure the software can adapt to increases in the number of users and additional projects.
2. Integration
Does the stakeholder management program need to integrate with any other software you are using in order to be effective? For example, ensuring integration with your email and database systems is essential.
3. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) vs. onsite servers
There are advantages to both systems, but SaaS offers lower start-up costs and makes it easier to collaborate with consultants and other business partners.
4. Reporting
A key software feature is robust reporting capabilities. It’s important for software to enable you to report the communication history of a project but also to showcase the transparency of the events that occur.
Reports should summarize stakeholder engagement campaigns but also have the ability to go into great detail and be supported by original records such as emails, letters, meeting minutes etc. If misunderstandings occur, the ability to dig into a report to review original messages and interpretations can go a long way towards resolving an issue.
5. Product demo
A 1-1 product demo is one of the best ways to understand the capabilities of a stakeholder information management system – and a good initial indication of how well the platform and professional support staff will meet your needs.
Consider the following tips to get the most out of your stakeholder management software demo:
- Involve your company end users: they will have questions about their workflow and how the new software affects it.
- Create a process script in advance: make sure you advise the vendor what needs to be covered in the demo.
- Create detailed scorecards: allowing you to objectively compare each vendor’s product.
Check out our FREE Stakeholder Management Software Buying Guide.
This e-book will walk you through a series of important pre-purchase considerations and will offer up tips and resources aimed at helping you make an informed buying decision.
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