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2.2 Project Stakeholders
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Project stakeholders are individuals and organizations who are actively involved in
the project, or whose interests may be positively or negatively affected as a result of
project execution or project completion; they may also exert influence over the project and
its results. The project management team
must identify the stakeholders, determine their requirements,
and then manage and influence those expectations to ensure a successful project.
Stakeholder identification is often especially difficult. For example, is an
assembly-line worker whose future employment depends on the outcome of a new
product-design project a stakeholder?
In addition to these there are many different names and categories of project
stakeholders—internal and external, owners and funders, sellers and contractors,
team members and their families, government agencies and media outlets, individual
citizens, temporary or permanent lobbying organizations, and society at large.
The naming or grouping of stakeholders is primarily an aid to identifying which
individuals and organizations view themselves as stakeholders. Stakeholder roles and
responsibilities may overlap, as when an engineering firm provides financing for a
plant it is designing.
Managing stakeholder expectations may be difficult because stakeholders often
have very different objectives that may come into conflict. For example:
In general, differences between or among stakeholders should be resolved in favor
of the customer. This does not, however, mean that the needs and expectations of other
stakeholders can or should be disregarded. Finding appropriate resolutions to such
differences can be one of the major challenges of project management.
Key stakeholders on every project include:
Project manager—the individual
responsible for managing the project. Customer—the individual or organization
who will use the project
product. There may be multiple layers of customers. For example, the customers for a
new pharmaceutical product may include the doctors who prescribe it, the
patients who take it, and the insurers who pay for it. In some application areas,
customer and user are synonymous, while in others customer refers to the
entity purchasing the project's results and users are those who will directly use the
project's product. Performing organization—the enterprise
whose employees are most directly
involved in doing the work of the project. Sponsor—the individual or group within
or external to the performing organization that
provides the financial resources, in cash or in kind, for the project. The manager of a department that has
requested a new management
information system may desire low cost, the system architect may emphasize technical
excellence, and the programming contractor may be most interested in
maximizing its profit. The vice president of research at an electronics firm may define new
product success as state-of-the-art technology, the vice president of manufacturing may
define it as world-class practices, and the vice president of marketing may be
primarily concerned with the number of new features. The owner of a real estate development project may be focused on timely
performance, the local governing body may desire to maximize tax revenue, an
environmental group may wish to minimize adverse environmental impacts,
and nearby residents may hope to relocate the project.
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