What is a stakeholder? Stakeholders include more than the project manager, the sponsor, the customer and team. The five edition of PMBOK defines a stakeholder as individual group or organization who may affect, be affected by a decision, activity or outcome of a project. As example in an industrial promotion an ecologist group could be a stakeholder with negative influence in the project.
Stakeholder can have positively or negatively impact in the project and a poor stakeholder management could be a high way to the project disaster. If the project manager miss one stakeholder this could lead to miss some important project requirements and in project delays. So in order to be successful the project manager should establish and maintain an appropriate stakeholder management and their engagement.
The process of manage the stakeholders should follow the next steps:
- Identify all the stakeholders: Miss one stakeholder, means miss requirements that will be appear late and could be on project delays. So it´s important identify all the stakeholders during the project initialization.
- Stakeholder analysis: For each stakeholder it´s necessary to analysis their interest, their impact and their level of influence on the project. The way to manage each stakeholder depends on their interest and influence.
- Gain all the stakeholder requirements: the project managers need to obtain all the requirements requested by the stakeholders. This is a previous step to define the project scope
- Create a stakeholder register: All the information gained could be compiled in a stakeholder matrix. This matrix should have information about contact information, requirements information, influence, interest.
Matrix example:
- Stakeholder management strategy: For each stakeholder the PMBOK recommends a different ways of management strategy depending on their influence and interest. The PMP recommendations are follow the chart below.
And some recommended stakeholder strategies are:
