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Anyone Seen My Stakeholders?
Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.
Do you know who your stakeholders are? Some of them are easy to identify, and others can be just as easy to overlook. But let’s assume for a moment that you have successfully identified all of those people who impact, or are impacted by, your project. The next step may be even harder--you have to engage them.
In this article I want to deal with the issue of reluctant stakeholders--those who don’t want to get involved in the project. Some project managers may think that this is a good thing--it’s fewer people to interfere with the way that the project is run. But just because a stakeholder is not involved doesn’t mean that they aren’t a stakeholder--the project will impact them.
Reluctant stakeholders
Stakeholders can be reluctant to get involved for a number of reasons. They may genuinely not believe that they have any role to play on your project, or they may feel that their involvement isn’t a priority for them against all of the other things that they have to do. Of course there is always the possibility that politics are involved and that the stakeholders are consciously choosing to opt out of a project that they don’t support.
Whatever the reason, you can’t simply ignore these people. By definition, a stakeholder is someone who is impacted by your project, so sooner or later they need to be …
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