Project Planning
Imagine your next project launch. The rollout is on time and even on budget - the team feels invincible! But then an unexpected stakeholder emerges from the shadows, to cause delay and frustration. To avoid this scenario, early identification of stakeholders is crucial.
Who is a Stakeholder in a Project?
A stakeholder is anyone who has a vested interest in your project's success or failure. This includes budget holders, fellow employees, customers, partners, and even competitors (if they aren’t impacted, what’s your business case?) - those who will have to live or die by the fruits of your labour. By identifying and managing these stakeholders early, you can ensure that your project meets needs, avoids conflicts, and delivers value.
In this post, I look at how you can effectively identify and classify your stakeholders in order to capture project needs, constraints and benefits.
Do I Need to Identify all the Stakeholders?
In the types of projects I work on, project leads often like to keep the stakeholder list pretty short. Communicating and negotiating with everyone covered by the full definition is not something they usually want to do.
However, it is vital that you identify all relevant stakeholders (or stakeholder groups) in order to deliver a successful project. Otherwise, you may miss the opportunity to fully meet a need (the very business of projects) or you actually create the risk of doing unnecessary work.
Yes, this might mean other departments. Yes, this might mean customers and end users. And yes, it might be difficult.
TL;DR - Yes.