Stanley E. Portny - Project Management For Dummies

The system designers had spent substantial time and money working with the liaisons to identify and address the interests and needs of the end users. However, the liaisons had raised only issues from their own experience instead of identifying and sharing the needs and concerns of the local bank personnel. Because English was the primary language of all the liaisons, they failed to consider the possible need to prepare system instructions in multiple languages. Putting the local bank personnel on the stakeholder register along with the liaisons would’ve reminded the project personnel not to overlook their special needs.

Suppose you’re asked to coordinate your organization’s annual blood drive. Figure 4-1 illustrates some of the groups and people you may include in your project’s stakeholder register as you prepare for your new project.

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FIGURE 4-1:The beginning of a sample stakeholder register for an annual blood drive.

Many different groups of people may influence the success of or have an interest in your project. Knowing who these people are allows you to plan to involve them at the appropriate times during your project. Therefore, identifying all project stakeholders as soon as possible and reflecting any changes in those stakeholders as soon as you find out about them are important steps to take as you manage your project.

To ensure your stakeholder register is complete and up-to-date, consider the following guidelines:

Eventually identify each stakeholder by position description and name. You may, for example, initially identify people from sales and marketing as stakeholders. Eventually, however, you want to specify the particular people from that group — such as brand manager for XYZ product, Sharon Wilson — and their contact information.

Speak with a wide range of people. Check with people in different organizational units, from different disciplines, and with different tenures in the organization. Ask every person whether they can think of anyone else you should speak with. The more people you speak with, the less likely you are to overlook someone important.

Allow sufficient time to develop your stakeholder register. Start to develop your register as soon as you become project manager. The longer you think about your project, the more potential stakeholders you can identify. Throughout the project, continue to check with people to identify additional stakeholders.

Include stakeholders who may play a role at any time during your project. Your only job at this stage is to identify names so you don’t forget them. At a later point, you can decide whether, when, and how to involve these people (see the later section “ Determining Whether Stakeholders Are Drivers, Supporters, or Observers”).

Include team members’ functional managers. Include the people to whom the project manager and team members directly report. Even though functional managers usually don’t perform project tasks themselves, they can help ensure that the project manager and team members devote the time they originally committed to the project and that they have the resources necessary to perform their project assignments.

Include a person’s name on the stakeholder register for every role they play. Suppose your manager plans to provide expert technical advice to your project team. Include your manager’s name twice — once as your direct supervisor and once as the technical expert. If your manager is promoted but continues to serve as a technical advisor to your project, the separate listings remind you that a new person now occupies your direct supervisor’s slot.

Continue to add and remove names from your stakeholder register throughout your project. Your stakeholder register evolves as you understand more about your project and as your project changes. Plan to review your register at regular intervals throughout the project to identify names that should be added or deleted. Encourage people involved in your project to continually identify new stakeholders as they think of them.

When in doubt, write down a person’s name. Your goal is to avoid overlooking someone who may play an important part in your project. Identifying a potential audience member doesn’t mean you have to involve that person; it simply means you have to consider her. Eliminating the name of someone who won’t be involved is a lot easier than trying to add the name of someone who should be.

A stakeholder register template is a predesigned stakeholder register that contains typical categories and stakeholders for a particular type of project. You may develop and maintain your own stakeholder register templates for tasks you perform, functional groups may develop and maintain stakeholder register templates for tasks they typically conduct, or your organization’s project management office may develop and maintain templates for the entire organization.

Regardless of who maintains the template, it reflects people’s cumulative experiences. As the organization continues to perform projects of this type, stakeholders that were overlooked in earlier efforts may be added and stakeholders that proved unnecessary removed. Using these templates can save you time and improve your accuracy.

Suppose you prepare the budget for your department each quarter. After doing a number of these budgets, you know most of the people who give you the necessary information, who draft and print the document, and who have to approve the final budget. Each time you finish another budget, you revise your stakeholder register template to include new information from that project. The next time you prepare your quarterly budget, you begin your stakeholder register with your template. You then add and subtract names as appropriate for that particular budget preparation.

When using stakeholder register templates, keep the following guidelines in mind:

Develop templates for frequently performed tasks and for entire projects. Stakeholder register templates for kicking off the annual blood drive or submitting a newly developed drug to the Food and Drug Administration are valuable. But so are templates for individual tasks that are part of these projects, such as awarding a competitive contract or printing a document. Many times, projects that appear totally new actually contain some tasks that you’ve done before. You can still reap the benefits of your prior experience by including the stakeholder register templates for these tasks in your overall project stakeholder register.

Focus on position descriptions rather than the names of prior stakeholders. Identify a stakeholder as accounts payable manager rather than Bill Miller. People come and go, but functions endure. For each specific project, you can fill in the appropriate names.

Develop and modify your stakeholder register template from previous projects that actually worked, not from initial plans that looked good but lacked key information. Often you develop a detailed stakeholder register at the start of your project but don’t revise the register during the project or add stakeholders whom you overlooked in your initial planning. If you update your template with information from an initial list only, your template can’t reflect the discoveries you made throughout the earlier project.