Stakeholder Analysis

To make the project success stakeholder management is very important. Before this one need to identify the stakeholders in the project, their needs, expectations, etc… This will be taken care by a technique Stakeholder Analysis. It is a systematic approach to identify the needs in terms of qualitative and quantitative. Also the technique helps in understanding the influence of stakeholders towards the project and with other stakeholders in terms of relationships. To list a few activities:

•Identify the potential stakeholders, their contact information, from which function they belongs to, external or internal, their needs, roles, etc.. It is difficult to identify all the stakeholders in the beginning. To overcome this challenge identify the key stakeholders such as sponsor, primary customer and involve them and use the other techniques like Meeting, Expert Judgment to identify the potential stakeholders. Of course identification of stakeholders has to happen throughout the project.

•Understand each stakeholder impact and support, so that accordingly you can prioritize the communication in an efficient manner.

•Assess how the stakeholders may react to different situations which help in identifying the threats for the project.

There are different models which can be developed with Stakeholder Analysis: Power vs Interest grid, Power/Influence grid, Influence vs Impact grid and Salience model which considers three parameters namely power, urgency and legitimacy.

The diagrams below show the Power vs Influence grid and the Salience Model.

Stakeholder Analysis technique is used under the process Identify Stakeholders.