Identifying Stakeholders for Your Project

People: Mentor and Collaborate with Stakeholders

Identifying Stakeholders for Your Project

Identifying Stakeholders for Your Project

Learn to identify stakeholders, understand how they can impact your project, and keep them satisfied.

As a project manager, defining who your stakeholders are is key to a project’s successful outcome. This endeavor requires a deeper dive into the specific impact different groups can have on a project—at both the beginning of a project, as well as at key milestones.

Juan Toro, CSM, PMI-ACP, PMI-PBA, PMP, a senior sales consultant at Oracle, says that identifying stakeholders is an iterative process, and one that should be done at the start of a project as well as at predetermined points throughout the project.

“Identifying stakeholders is one of the first things that a project manager and the project team should do. If you don’t define stakeholders at the beginning, it will present a big risk for a project’s success,” says Mr. Toro. “Engaging them is a continuous process during the entire project. One of the biggest mistakes a project manager can make is to engage the stakeholders only at the beginning of the project—and during the rest of the project they forget that they exist.”

Project stakeholders can include a wide array of people, groups and organizations. Identifying them means not only learning their name and contact information, but also understanding what’s important to them and gauging their level of project interaction. To effectively leverage stakeholders, you must determine how different stakeholders prefer to communicate. In addition, you should assess their level of expertise in the project. These criteria will help you prioritize different stakeholders in terms of their impact and influence on the project.

Identifying Stakeholders for Your Project

Traditional stakeholders are directly connected to a project, and have various reasons for their interest in a project’s success. Some of these stakeholders include:

• The project sponsor

• An organization’s investors and shareholders, employees and customers

• Contractors and suppliers

• Lenders and creditors

• The project team

Start With the Regulars

A broader group of stakeholders has recently been emerging, and expands on the more traditional definition of “stakeholder.” These include groups that could impact your project, even if they aren’t contained within or directly related to the primary organization. Some of these groups include:

• Regulators

• Lobby groups

• Environmentalists

• Financial organizations

• The media

• The community

Think Outside the Box

The bottom line is that engaged stakeholders are happy stakeholders. And happy stakeholders can positively impact your project’s successful outcome. Identifying and meeting stakeholders’ various needs for information keeps them happy. In this endeavor, communication is key. Touching base, providing regular updates, project data and progress reports, as well as getting and leveraging regular feedback, helps ensure that stakeholders are on board with a project’s direction.

Identifying a stellar lineup of project stakeholders takes time, legwork and a thoughtful approach. Getting started on the right foot with properly identifying and engaging your project stakeholders enables you to develop a meaningful strategy for meeting and managing stakeholder expectations, ultimately creating a project outcome that everyone is happy about.

Make Ongoing Engagement a Priority

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