Stakeholder Management Overview

Who are Stakeholders?

Stakeholders are individuals who get impacted by the project. A Stakeholder can be supporter and a resistor.

Project Stakeholder Management involves identification of stakeholders, analysis of their expectations and influences, development of appropriate strategies to work with the stakeholders and executing the process. Frequent communication is required with the stakeholders. Needs and expectations of the stakeholders to be understood. Managing conflicting interest and involving stakeholders in key project decisions and activities is also crucial. All of this forms a part of stakeholder management process. Project manager is expected to possess the ability to identify the needs and influences of the stakeholders to manage them effectively.

Identify Stakeholders

The process of identifying individuals who are impacted by the project is known as Identify Stakeholders Process. The project manager will be able to identify the appropriate focus of each stakeholder as an outcome of Identify Stakeholders process. Stakeholders can include the customers, sponsors, employees, management, government and society as well. These stakeholders have a potential to exert positive or negative influence on the project deliverables.

Stakeholder needs are to be identified at an early stage of the project to ensure that all their requirements and voices are considered. The stakeholders can be classified on the basis of their interest in the project, the level of influence on the project outcome and their involvement. For the success of the project, the project manager needs to have a relationship that is cordial and extremely success oriented.

Stakeholders Process can receive inputs from:

• Project Charter: Internal and external parties related to the project are identified using the project charter

• Procurement Documents: The parties involved in a procurement contract are key project stakeholders

• Enterprise Environmental Factors: Organizational culture, its structure, governmental regulations, trends, practices or habits of individuals represent enterprise environmental factors

• Organizational Process Assets: Stakeholder registers from previous projects, lessons learned are important inputs for identifying stakeholders

Stakeholder Analysis

Qualitative and quantitative analysis are required to systematically determine the interest of stakeholders throughout the project. The benefits of this analysis are:

• Stakeholder interests can be identified

• Stakeholder expectations can be identified

• Another benefit includes identification of stakeholder relationships that can be leveraged to build partnerships with stakeholders to increase the probability of project success

Steps involved in stakeholder analysis process are:

• Identification of potential stakeholders including their roles, departments, interests, knowledge, expectations, and influence levels.

• Identify and analyze potential impact each stakeholder could generate

• Classify the stakeholders basis logical categories of potential impact

• Determine the likely reaction of these stakeholders to respond in various situations

• Plan the approach strategy to enhance their positive support and reduce negative influences

Multiple classification models are used for stakeholder analysis, but not limited to:

Power/Interest grid:

Bifurcation of stakeholders based on their level of authority and their level of concern regarding project outcomes.

Power/Influence grid:

Bifurcation of stakeholders based on their level of authority and their level of involvement in the project

Power/Impact grid:

Bifurcation of stakeholders based on their level of authority and their level of impacting changes on project activities

Salience model:

This model describes categories of stakeholders based on their power, urgency and legitimacy.

Outputs of Identifying Stakeholders:

Stakeholder register is updated with details such as:

• Stakeholder information

• Includes their name, organizational position, location, role in the project, business phone number, email address, etc

• Stakeholder requirements

• Key expectations, major requirements, involvement in the project etc

• Stakeholder Classification