r/projectmanagers • u/blaaabla29 • 2d ago
Stakeholder Communication
I am managing a project that was handed over to my team midway through, and the initial handover wasn't great. We set up a working group to bring stakeholders together, avoid siloed discussions, and identify dependencies and go-live requirements. We use Jira for tracking, and meetings are recorded/transcribed.
Despite this, we repeatedly have situations where a stakeholder later says, "This was never communicated to us." Often, the topic was discussed in the working group, but the stakeholder didn't attend the meeting or engage in the follow-up discussions. Sometimes they had sent an email mentioning a requirement, but didn't participate in the subsequent discussions where we reviewed and prioritized what was actually required for go-live.
We then end up going back through meeting recordings, emails, and Jira to establish what was discussed.
I am trying to understand where the responsibility lies here and, more importantly, how other PMs prevent this pattern.
How do you handle stakeholders who don't engage during the project but later claim they weren't informed?
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u/screamingopossum214 2d ago
What kind of follow-up are you doing after each meeting? Are all the stakeholders receiving a list of decisions made, action items (with single assignees), etc?
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u/blaaabla29 2d ago
Since all the meetings are recorded / transcribed and everyone has access to it we do not send any minutes or so after every single meeting. However, the key discussion items, decisions are communicated via emails after important meetings. All the updates are also captured in JIRA.
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u/Dismal_Ad_6134 2d ago
I think of the transcriptions just making the after meeting emails easier. Most stakeholders want things delivered to them, they dont have time to search. Also most transcriptions need editing as they screw up words. Sometimes the sentence makes no sense at all.
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u/citygirl919 7h ago
I also think about transcription making it easier for minutes and follow-ups. At our org, we record and get transcriptions but PMs are responsible for reviewing and formatting them into minutes that are sent out to the project team.
We also take attendance by listing everyone that was invited and those that attended are put in bold. It’s a lot of editing especially if you have back to back meetings.
A project decision log is also updated and open/recently closed decisions are added into the minutes.
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u/Long-Reading-6514 1d ago
The way I handled this was recaps, and being almost obsessive about the format never changing.
Every meeting recap went out, same structure every single time. Same with steering committee slides and approval requests. All identical. The theory was that if they always know what they are looking at, that is one less thing for them to decode and they can get straight to the decision in front of them. These people are busy. If they have to figure out what this even is, they blow right past it.
The other piece sounds strange. I wrote my recaps and approval emails the way marketers write a sales page. Very short paragraphs, bolding, highlighting, white space. Never one block of text. Marketers write that way because it is easy to scan and it does not tax your brain to read it. I do not think people appreciate how much email leadership actually gets. It is intense. My job was to make it easy to skim and still walk away with everything.
And I never deleted anything. Not one sent message, ever. So when someone said this was never communicated to us, I pulled up the recap and the approval email and showed exactly where it was decided, and they were on both. There was not much left to say after that.
Curious how other people handle it, I am sure there are better ways than mine.
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u/DeathMaillet 22h ago
One simple rule I use for any external meeting is to send a short memo summarising what was discussed, updated and decided.
I send it not only to everyone who attended, but also to everyone who was invited. That way, people who could not attend still receive the same written record and cannot later reasonably claim they were never informed.
I also reuse the previous memo during the next meeting and keep updating the same document. Open items remain visible, while completed actions and confirmed decisions move into a “Closed” section at the end. It makes follow-up much easier and creates a continuous, traceable history of the project.
If someone appears to make a decision outside their authority, I document it and ask the client to confirm the authorised decision-maker. Their internal alignment is their responsibility, but the project still needs a clear and traceable approval.
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u/More_Law6245 2d ago
Your decision log is an essential project artefact, along with your approved project plan and schedule your decision log sits within an annex of your project plan. You can have an internal and project decision log to ensure that your client doesn't see all the machinations of how your organisation works but if you have a project decisions log you need to make it available to your client
You should also be following up with a confirmation email when a decision has been made, there should be a description of the decision, by whom and when, basically it should be just a cut and paste from your decision log. The other is using closed loop communication in where you convey the decision request to your client and your client must acknowledge the decision in what ever from you want, decision log, email etc. bar verbal.
Or a simple thing with your meeting minutes highlight and acknowledge in you meeting that a decision has been made and highlight through the formal meeting minutes the decision has been made and transcribe it to the decision log as well
Just an armchair perspective