Stakeholders
As a reminder, a stakeholder is a person or group with an interest in the project and who can impact it; for example, customers, suppliers, end users, team members, competitors, regulators, etc.
Stakeholder management is essential to the success of a project, and we explored different aspects of it in the principles chapter. All methodologies integrate stakeholder management into their system, and it’s usually done in a way that satisfies the average requirements of their target audience.
In the stakeholder management domain, the old-fashioned methods were mainly focused on external stakeholders. Then the Agile methods took the opposite approach and focused mainly on internal stakeholders. Modern approaches try to pay attention to both aspects.
If you need to be serious about stakeholder management, you need to have these elements in place:
- Identify.
- Understand and analyze.
- Prioritize.
- Engage.
- Monitor.
You should repeat these steps continuously throughout the project and embed them into your existing method if they are not already there.