Ensuring Project Smoothness through Stakeholder-based Project Management Approach

One way of ensuring the successful completion of a project is through using a stakeholder-based approach. This method has many advantages but the biggest benefit is — Communicating with various stakeholders ensures that the purpose, utility and drawbacks of every undertaken project are fully understood. This further helps to anticipate the probable reactions and hurdles that might prove contrary to the execution of the project.

Stakeholders tend to vary with each project but they can be best understood as people or even organizations that are directly concerned with the implementation of a project. This means that the interest of stakeholders is directly linked with the satisfactory completion of a project. Hence, stakeholders exert an direct or indirect influence over the project’s outcomes by affecting the completion of various project-related tasks or assignments.

Problem: An organization must be capable of identifying its stakeholders and determine the role played by each of them and their individual influence in ensuring the execution of a project. Every stakeholder has a different assigned responsibility and authority and these might even change over the life cycle of the project. However, identification of different stakeholders could prove to be very difficult.

Solution: Project management software packages are very useful in organizing information about the stakeholders and their respective roles with respect to various project-based assignments. The various kinds of stakeholders are:

People who would be eventually using the goods/services that are the outcome of a project are broadly defined as its users.

For example: in the case of a pharmaceutical product, the users would be the physicians/doctors who would be prescribing the product (drug/medicine), the patients who would be consuming it and the people (the patient/his family/the insured) who would be paying for it. Sometimes, customer and user become synonymous with each other but sometimes each is a separate entity, as a customer may just acquire a project’s product while the user actually utilizes it.

Sponsors are people who provide the financial resources that are needed to carry out the project. They fund every aspect that lies within the realm of implementing various activities that are a direct part of the project or indirectly related to it. Their interest lies in the financial gains that would come their way, once the project has been completed.

The project manager is the person in-charge of overlooking every assignment that is undertaken to ensure that the project’s execution faces no problem and every hindrance is resolved. He is answerable for under-performing team members and any delay or negative report that emerges during the life cycle of the project. It is vital that the Project Manager clearly defines certain aspects of a project that has been undertaken by his team. When the responsibilities are clearly defined, it becomes easier to track the progress made by each team member. For the purpose of appropriate distribution of various tasks, certain questions need to be answered by the Project Manager:

• Who are the end users of the product/services? What are their expectations?
• What is the nature of the project — is it product or service based?
• Are there any benchmarks against which the team’s performance will be compared?
• Can the demands of the project be met within the expected time frame and budget?
• Are his team members qualified to undertake the project?

These are people, sometimes even groups, who aren't directly related with a project’s eventual product but have a position of influence in the project-performing environment. They can positively or negatively influence the course of the project.

In a nutshell, you will find that stakeholder analysis actually helps in effective project management and making projects smoother. For smooth projects identification of stakeholders is extremely important. It not only ensures smoothness of existing projects but also helps in drawing innovative strategies for future projects based on careful evaluation of all the manual as well as technical activities involved.

For more pragmatic insight on stakeholders, read Stakeholders Management.