Stakeholder Analysis 101

Stakeholder analysis is a step you must undertake to understand and evaluate the stakeholders for your project. This step is often neglected, skipped or taken for granted. It is easy to overlook because humans tends to make assumptions for stakeholders. I will loosely classify stakeholders into these categories. You must take note to manage and include these stakeholders from the start of project.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Stakeholders can be divided into the good, the bad and the ugly! You need to focus on gathering these good stakeholders who can play the roles well.

• Sponsor to support and orchestra your project vision
• Functional roles to implement your project objectives
• Influencer to motivate and champion your project goals

Bad and ugly stakeholders are attracted to all projects. This is inevitable and steps must be taken to understand and mitigate their influence. Sometimes, decision must be made to swap these negative stakeholders out.

Required Representation

In every project, it is not surprising to see the wrong stakeholder leading the project. Halfway through the project, you realise a representative is missing for a function group. You may even notice that this repeats into the next project. Thus, it is important to start the project with the required stakeholders with a minimum of 2 representatives. Why? This is because all humans have downtime and you need backup to ensure continuity.

Stakeholder analysis is an essential steps for project success. Identifying positive stakeholders helps to drive your project goals. You must learn to analyse and downplay bad and ugly stakeholders. Lastly, you need to ensure at least 2 representation of stakeholders in your projects.