What would be the best steps to manage your stakeholders expectations?

I agree with the good answer of Mr. Mohamed Yehia Zakria.

Managing stakeholders' expectation could turns to a land mine if project manager miss to correctly read and manage his stakeholders.

1 - First know your stakeholders: Their back ground terminology they are familiar with and their focal point of your project (pain points anticipated to get cured).

2 - When addressing challenges and solutions have the stakeholders' participation and plant the ownership by sharing achievements credit with all of them.

3 - Always avoid lengthy detailed presentations, use the terminology that can get them quickly to the point, avoid ambiguity and complication.

4 - Have the signoff papers always updated and change requests approved by them.

5 - Visual project improvement graphs simple and clear will keep them satisfied and will spare you from rosy dreams or angry stones in the water.

- Ensure clear definition of them at the outset.

- Agree on your targets and calrify if any of the expectations are not targeted at this stage, why, & whether they will be addresses at later stages.

- Plan the actions required to satisfy the aproved targets and communicate the approved plan to all stakeholders and invite comments.

This way all stakeholders are aware of what is targeted and how much does that satisfy thier expectations and they may conciously make their decisions at the outset.

 Manage stakeholders smartly to prevent them to manage your project & affecting on the business:

1- Always put them in the overall project status

2- Let them feel the project on the right way & you need your support to avoid any delay or budget exceed

3- Deal with any change request from their side by showing the impact on budget, cost, or quality & let them decide

4-Put an eye on completion to deliver the project & get the invoices paid by defining the actual/real stakeholders from the begining

1.      Developing a communication strategy that brings the right information of the stakeholder's expectations.

2.     Map  stakeholders the expectations define, document, maintain and communicate the overall intentions, principles and values, in form of  Policy.

3.     Establish objectives, measures and targets for fulfilling the organization’s purpose and its policies, assessing risks and develop plans and processes for achieving the objectives that take due account of these risks.

4.     Convert customer needs and expectations into products and services that will satisfy them by Implementation of  resource, operate and manage the plans and processes to deliver outputs that achieve the planned results.

5.     Monitor, measure and audit processes, the fulfillment of objectives and policies and satisfaction of stakeholders.

6.     Aanalyze and evaluate the results of measurement, determine performance against objectives and determine changes needed in policies, objectives, measures, targets and processes for the continuing suitability, adequacy and effectiveness of the system.

7.     Improvement – undertake action to bring about improvement by better control, better utilization of resources and better understanding of stakeholder needs. This might include innovation and learning.

Stakeholder analysis and accordingly making the negative actors into positive is the best step to manage our stakeholders.