The importance of stakeholder management is to support an organization in achieving its strategic objectives by interpreting and influencing both the external and internal environments and by creating positive relationships with stakeholders through the appropriate management of their expectations and agreed objectives. Stakeholder Management is a process and control that must be planned and guided by underlying Principles.

Stakeholder Management, within business or projects, prepares a strategy

Strategy

Strategy, a word of military origin, refers to a plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal. In military usage strategy is distinct from tactics, which are concerned with the conduct of an engagement, while strategy is concerned with how different engagements are linked...

 utilising information (or intelligence) gathered during the following common processes:

• Stakeholder Identification - Interested parties either internal or external to organisation/project. A stakeholder map is helpful for identifying the stakeholders.

• Stakeholder Analysis
  Stakeholder analysis
  Stakeholder analysis in conflict resolution, project management, and business administration, is the process of identifying the individuals or groups that are likely to affect or be affected by a proposed action, and sorting them according to their impact on the action and the impact the action...
  
   - Recognise and acknowledge stakeholder's needs, concerns, wants, authority, common relationships, interfaces and align this information within the Stakeholder Matrix.

• Stakeholder Matrix - Positioning stakeholders according to the level of influence, impact or enhancement they may provide to the business or its projects.

• Stakeholder engagement
  Stakeholder engagement
  Stakeholder engagement is the process by which an organisation involves people who may be affected by the decisions it makes or can influence the implementation of its decisions...
  
   - Different to Stakeholder Management in that the engagement does not seek to develop the project/business requirements, solution or problem creation, or establishing roles and responsibilities. It is primarily focused at getting to know and understand each other, at the Executive level. Engagement is the opportunity to discuss and agree expectations of communication and, primarily, agree a set of Values and Principles that all stakeholders will abide by.

• Communicating Information - Expectations are established and agreed for the manner in which communications are managed between stakeholders - who receives communications, when, how and to what level of detail. Protocols may be established including security and confidentiality
  Confidentiality
  Confidentiality is an ethical principle associated with several professions . In ethics, and in law and alternative forms of legal resolution such as mediation, some types of communication between a person and one of these professionals are "privileged" and may not be discussed or divulged to...
  
   classifications.)

Stakeholder Agreements (A collection of agreed decisions between stakeholders. This may be the lexicon

Lexicon

In linguistics, the lexicon of a language is its vocabulary, including its words and expressions. A lexicon is also a synonym of the word thesaurus. More formally, it is a language's inventory of lexemes. Coined in English 1603, the word "lexicon" derives from the Greek "λεξικόν" , neut...

of an organisation or project, or the Values of an initiative, the objectives, or the model of the organisation, etc. These should be signed by key stakeholder representatives.

Contemporary or modern business and project practice favours transparent, honest and open stakeholder management processes.