From the course: Project Management Foundations

Identify project stakeholders

From the course: Project Management Foundations

Identify project stakeholders

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- As project manager, you need to know who has a stake in the outcome of your project. They're called stakeholders. They include the customer, project sponsor, departments involved with the project, and people who work on project tasks. You need to know what they expect from the project and how they contribute to it. It's vital to understand stakeholders importance, influence and interest in the project. That way, you can build relationships with influential stakeholders and make sure they're satisfied with project results. Let's start by identifying major stakeholder roles. The project customer is the person or group with a problem to solve. For the hospital scheduling project, the COO oversees scheduling, so she is the customer. The project customer brings three crucial things to a project. First, the customer funds the project. In the hospital, the CEO oversees the overall budget for the new cancer wing and operational improvements, but the hospital COO is in-charge of the budget for the scheduling project. Second, the customer has a lot to say about what the project will do. Third, the customer approves deliverables from start to finish. The next stakeholder role is project sponsor. The sponsor is someone who wants to see the project succeed and has enough formal authority to help make that happen. Like an executive, who believes in the project. For the scheduling project, the COO is also the project sponsor. She wants to see it succeed because she believes effective scheduling not only improves patient care and medical results, but also produces better financial results. Her position gives her enough authority to champion the project. A sponsor can help prioritize objectives, talk to stakeholders who aren't being supportive, and suggest improvements to the project plan. The third type of stakeholder is a functional or aligned manager. Functional managers run departments and are accountable for achieving their department's goals. They also manage the people in their departments who are the ones you need to staff your project. Team members are also stakeholders. While they're assigned to your project, their jobs depend on their assignments and may depend on how well they perform. Finally, there are departments or people who affect the project, and there are departments or people who are affected by it. Both of these groups are project stakeholders. For example, the project will affect how hospital facilities are scheduled so the facilities department is a stakeholder in the scheduling project. As a project manager, you need to know a lot about stakeholders in order to keep them happy. The first step is knowing who they are.

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