Welcome all. This is the second in the series of project management workshop that we are conducting in Neturja Office here at Nahan. In the previous workshop we had introduction on Project Management where we talked about what is project, what we understand by project management and role of project manager.  We also discussed in details the first process of Project Life cycle phase in Initiation process group – Project Charter.

Today we discuss another process in the same Initiation phase-

Identify Stakeholder

This is one of the most important and fundamental process in a project life cycle. Missing any key stakeholder and or failure to address their issue/concerns often leads to project failure. Probably this is the reason why PMI till  PMBOK version 4, made this process a part of Communication management Knowledge area has now added it in its own Knowledge area of ‘Stakeholder Management’ in PMBOK 5.

It’s very-very important to know your stakeholder. After all, the reason we undertake any project is to satisfy its stakeholders need.

So who are stakeholders?

Any person or even a organisation who has active interest in the project (e.g. Project Team, PM, tester) or whose interest is positive or negatively affected by the execution or completion of project (e.g. End user, Media, Govt., tax authorities) can be called as stakeholders.

For e.g. For Construction of water dam Project, stakeholders who have positive effect would be people who will get water or electricity. Stakeholder with negative effect would be the people who will get displaced or the environmentalist organisation who might fear for the damage to flora or fauna of the region.

What is the PM role in this process?

Project Management team must identify both internal and external stakeholder to know the project requirements & expectations of all involved. PM should also manage the influence of stakeholder in requirements. Key benefit to project manager from stakeholder identification is that he can identify appropriate focus for each stakeholder and build necessary relationship.

So let’s dig into the process of stakeholder identification.

Input:

1. Project Charter. As discussed in day1 workshop, it contains both internal and external person that are interested or gets affected.

2. Enterprise environmental Factors: Organisation culture & structure, Industry standards, trends, practices or habits.

3. Organisational Assets:  stakeholder register template, stakeholder list from previous projects, lesson learned from previous project.

Tools & Techniques:

1. Stakeholder analyses: This is technique of systematically gathering and analysing quantitative and qualitative information to determine whose interest should we bother about. It identifies interest, expectation & influence of the stakeholders.

This technique generally follows below step.

Step1. Identify stakeholder and their relevant information like role, department, interest and influence level.

Step2. Analyse the impact and support each stakeholder could generate so as to define an appropriate strategy.

Step3. Also asses how key stakeholders are likely to react or respond in various situations.

There are many classification models are used for stakeholder analyses one of those is Power/Interest Grid.

Power interest grid

The above model suggests 4 different ways stakeholder can be deal with. Stakeholder with high power but low interest as depicted by .A in image should be keep satisfied.  For e.g.  Any request from these people should be taken on high priority but they may not need to informed consistently of project updates

Stakeholder with High Power and High interest (shown as .B) should be managed closely for e.g. Any request from them or their requirement should be handled on top priority also they should be regularly informed with progress.

Stakeholder with Low power but high interest ( shown as .C) should be regularly informed.

Stakeholder with low power and low interest (shown as .D) should be monitored with min effort.

There is another model called salience model where stakeholders are classified based on their Power, legitimacy and urgency. This model classifies stakeholder in 7 ways and shows ways to deal with them.

1. Other technique to identify and classify stakeholder is expert Judgement where expertise is sought from groups or individual who have experience in this process senior management, other units or even identified key stakeholders.

Output:

Stakeholder register. This register contains all details of the identified stakeholders including but not limited to

a)      Identification Information: Name, position, contact info, role in the project.

b)      Assessment information:  Major requirements, expectations, concerns, issues.

c)       Classification: Internal/external, support/neutral/resistor.

This concludes session 1 of our workshop on stakeholder identification. After this we will enter into next phase of project Life cycle: Planning. In this we will talk about process ‘ collect requirement’ from knowledge area of ‘ Scope management’.

Tags: Identify stakeholder, project managment