Stakeholder Management: Eliminating Emotion

Patti Gilchrist, PMP, is a Senior Technical Manager with more than 20 years of IT experience. Visit her website at www.freepmstudy.com

  Stakeholder Management  

In PMBOK 5, PMI has moved Stakeholder Management into its own section due to the complexity and importance of this topic. Many projects fail due to ineffective stakeholder management (i.e., failure to identify all the stakeholders, lack of stakeholder engagement, inadequate stakeholder management strategies, etc.). And effectively managing stakeholders is one of the most difficult tasks in a project.

Projects cause change, and let’s face it: Change is not always easy or readily embraced. Thus, PMI has expanded upon stakeholder concepts and separated this topic in order to increase the focus on the importance of stakeholder management as a critical component of project success.

In PMBOK 5, Stakeholder Management includes the processes required to identify the people, groups or organizations that could impact or be impacted by the project. PMI breaks the Stakeholder Management knowledge area into the following processes:

1. Identify Stakeholders: Identify all people, groups or organizations that could impact or be impacted by a decision, activity or outcome of the project, analyze stakeholder expectations and their interest and potential impacts on the project, and assess how each are likely to respond to various situations and events.
2. Plan Stakeholder Management: Develop appropriate management strategies for effectively engaging stakeholders in …

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