14 Questions that Identify Project Stakeholders

Stakeholders are those people that care about your project(s) for one reason or another. Identifying those people who have a stake in your project is critical; miss just one and your project’s success can be significantly undermined.

I keep a list of questions that have been very effective in helping me determine who I should develop and sustain relationships with to attain the highest levels of accomplishment, achievement and benefits. These questions can work for you, too!

1. Who is impacted by the project portfolio’s approach? Remember to consider positive and negative impacts.
2. Who regulates the solution space? Who creates the project environment? Neglecting to include regulators or audit, compliance and risk management functions can leave you scrambling at the last minute. Forgetting to involve the people that establish the development, quality and implementation environments that the projects in your project portfolio rely on can lead to schedule mishaps and delays.
3. Who created or can stop, change or defer the project’s strategic alignment? It is not enough to work only with the sponsor of the strategy your project is aligned with. Include those that can influence the strategy once it is in place. Knowing who opposes or questions the project’s value is just as important as knowing who embraces it.
4. Who must sign off on key decisions? The number of stakeholders revealed by this question is largely determined by your organization’s structure and reporting relationships.
5. Who can help resolve issues that are stumping your teams? When the best efforts of your teams fail to resolve an issue, understanding the escalation path is essential.
6. What business functions are interested in or should review project deliverables? Usually it is not enough to have the strategy owner review significant milestone results, although they might have the final say in the matter. Remember to include enterprise technology and governance functions.
7. Who are the key people involved in the interdependencies identified by your teams? Rare is the project portfolio that operates in a vacuum. Understand who is waiting on your project for results, and when your project is waiting on another project's results.
8. Who loses? Who benefits? Not everyone may benefit from the achievement of the strategy. Look for those areas who may have to sacrifice something in order to achieve success at the enterprise level.
9. Who gets more work? Whose workload is reduced? Realizing the value of your project may require that new processes are created, or that existing processes are modified. Ideally, any improvement has a net result of reducing workload at the enterprise level; however, some areas may have to absorb additional effort or people in order to make that success possible. Remember, the project will add work to the workload of your team in addition to any day-to-day work they must perform, at least until the project's benefits begin to be realized.
10. Who must change? Stakeholders become a part of your organizational change plan. Approximately one-third of those affected will welcome the change; another one-third will resist the change.
11. Who will be unhappy? Who will be ecstatic? Pay attention to the nonverbal reaction of people when you describe your project’s path and value. You want to have concerns, dissatisfaction and discouragement represented in your stakeholder group, as well as contentment, joy and delight.
12. Who influences you? This could be your manager, your program and project managers, a supplier, or subject matter expert.
13. Who has ideas about how to go about achieving the strategy the project is designed to deliver? Seeking out and acknowledging those ideas is just as important as determining which ones (if any) to implement.
14. Who is funding your project? The person with the pocketbook usually has a significant amount of influence.

Make the time to complete a stakeholder impact analysis. Follow the trail revealed by the initial analysis and repeat the process for peers of the stakeholders already identified. The resulting list of stakeholders should be included in the communication plan. The stakeholders can be represented in the project’s steering committee, furthering guiding the delivery its intended value and strategy.

How do you go about identifying your project's stakeholders?

Want to elevate your project management game, learn why I knew I wanted to be a project manager in 8th grade, or meet over coffee? Need a 30-minute free consultation on whatever ails your project??Schedule time with me!

Jan Schiller, ex-PMP, PSM1, FLMI, is a partner with?Berkshire Consulting, LLC. She specializes in revealing the path from where an organization is to where they want to be. Jan delights clients by transforming strategy into results with project management in the financial services, investment, health, beverage, learning management, wholesale printing and life sciences industries. She has helped her clients with the adoption of project management best practices; streamlining business processes; complying with regulations; achieving competitive advantage, innovating effectively, getting things done despite turbulent times, creating a fantastic customer experience, migrating to an industry-standard platform, maximizing productivity, and wrangling projects. In addition to being quoted in?PMNetwork Magazine, she's also discussed how to develop a PMO Project's scope statement on?Phoenix Business RadioX?and contributed to?PMWorld360's digital project management magazine.