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So What Exactly is a Stakeholder?
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.
We are always told that stakeholders--and particularly stakeholder engagement--is critical to the success of a project. You’ll get no argument from me on that score. But how many times has anyone taken a few minutes to explain what the heck a stakeholder is? I know that I need them, but I don’t know how to spot them--they don’t wear name badges. Some stakeholders are easy to identify--the project sponsor for example--but others aren’t always so obvious. So how do we identify them?
How to identify stakeholders
Stakeholders are people who impact or are impacted by the project. It’s not limited to just the sponsor, the resource owners and the customer (you do think that the customer is a stakeholder don’t you?). If you are conducting a project to meet some new regulatory requirement, then the regulatory body that established those requirements is a stakeholder in your project. Think about that--initially that sounds wrong: How can a regulatory body that you have had no dealings with be a stakeholder? But clearly they are--they are going to consume the output of the project and they have a stake in its success.
You therefore have to be extremely open-minded in identifying stakeholders. Many times the cause of a failed project is not stakeholder apathy but rather a failure to identify all of the stakeholders. You need to work …
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