Stakeholders and Related Projects


Stakeholders and Related Projects

As stated earlier in this book, stakeholders are a critical factor in the eXtreme project management model.

What Is a Stakeholder?

A stakeholder is a person, group , or organization outside your direct control that is involved with your project. Most stakeholders will provide services (requirements, expertise, equipment, etc.) to your project, receive services (data, functions, etc.), or have a two-way relationship.

Stakeholders can be either inside the organization or in another organization. Typical project stakeholders will be IT operations, internal auditing, the organization's business people who will be using the system, IT communications, vendors , project team members, members of the steering committee, the project sponsor, and business analysts.

Related projects are other projects within the organization that have an impact on your project or will be impacted by the current project. As for stakeholders, it is also possible for two projects to be interrelated.

It is important for you to identify which of the project's stakeholders and related projects are essential to the project's success. We have found it useful to triage your stakeholders into three levels of impact:

  • Critical: Those stakeholders who can prevent your project from achieving success before or after implementation; in other words, the showstoppers.

  • Essential: Those stakeholders who can delay your project from achieving success before or after implementation. In other words, you can work around them, as there will be some alternative stakeholders.

  • Nonessential: Stakeholders who are interested parties; that is, they have no direct impact on your project but, unless they are included in your communication, they can change their status to critical or essential.

In all projects, the team members and your project sponsor are by default critical stakeholders.

Abducted by Aliens

To determine the right level of criticality for a stakeholder, imagine that they are abducted by aliens during or after your project. This should help you clarify their impact.

As discussed earlier, all critical and essential stakeholders and project managers of related projects must agree to the business case and, where possible, should be involved in the RAP sessions. All critical stakeholders should sign the stakeholder agreement document described later. This document identifies the specific services required from the stakeholder.



Radical Project Management
Radical Project Management
ISBN: 0130094862
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 136
Authors: Rob Thomsett

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