Stakeholders Defined

A Stakeholder is anyone who, by action or inaction, can affect the outcome of your product, program, or project.

They can be an eventual user of your product, a customer, or a department on which you depend. They could even be a stockholder or regulator.

How Stakeholders Operate

Stakeholders can nix your efforts by withholding their approval, involvement or positive comment.  Or worse, they work at cross purposes to you.  Some even do so in surreptitious ways, and tell you they aren't doing so.  We've heard a name for this behavior at one company: the slow no, and at another: the nod.  This dynamic must be addressed head on, or it can cripple your project.

A great product is only as good as the ability and willingness of the Stakeholders to absorb it.

Working with Stakeholders

We work with you to ferret out who your stakeholders are, and design ways to get them involved earlier and more productively, with the objective of reducing or removing their ability to slow or kill your project.  We do so by working with them to understand their needs, wants, and possible contributions, and then finding ways to take advantage of key patterns that are shared across many Stakeholders.  It doesn't take a complete replan to do so, and the investment required is far outweighed by the improved success rate of your effort.  Here are some specific areas where this process can bear fruit for you:

Benefits of Purposefully Working with Stakeholders

Positive / negative Stakeholder energy can determine project success as much as a clean design or good technology.  The greater the scope of a project, the greater the size of this effect.  So we work to take advantage of the positive energy we find, and to mitigate the negative energy.  Here are some of the factors that determine how much control Stakeholders can wield over the success of your project.  My guess is that you face all these factors in your current efforts:

• Size of the effort (lines of code, expense, number of developers, etc.)
• Complexity of the project
• Risk involved
• Speed required
• Amount of change caused
• Degree of culture change required
• Number of people affected

The sooner and better one discovers and acts on Stakeholder issues, the more successful the project. The net is, the more personal the project is to the Stakeholders, and to you, the more you need Stakeholder Management.