Where Do Stakeholders Come From?

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.

  Stakeholder Management  

I have been involved in managing more projects than I care to admit, but the issue of stakeholder identification continues to be one of the most challenging that I have to deal with. It always seems to be such an easy thing to do--identify the people who can impact and/or influence the project, plus the people that the project impacts/influences. I mean, how hard can it really be? Well, apparently the answer is “very hard”. In this article, I want to talk about some of the tools that I use to identify them.

Before we start, let’s try to understand the real underlying issue when it comes to identifying stakeholders. In the majority of cases, it’s a failure to either understand that an individual or group is a stakeholder--or a failure to appreciate the significance of them being a stakeholder (“Well, technically they are stakeholders, but we don’t need to worry about them…”). Because the definition of a stakeholder is so broad, we end up applying an unofficial filter to the list of potential stakeholders to try and make the list more manageable.

In addition, team members often apply their own internal filter when they think of someone who might be a stakeholder because they feel that the connection is too vague. The only reliable way to overcome these problems is to create an environment where it is expected that we …

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