6/23 Chapter 3 Ideas

Chapter 3:  Know Your Key Stakeholders and Win Their Cooperation

Many stakeholders fall into an expected set of roles. Some people will play more than one role and some roles will be performed by more than one person. Identifying stakeholders is easy and the questions to ask are, “Who will make a contribution?” and “Who will be affected by this project?” One of the stakeholder roles is project manager, who has the primary role in any project. The project manager must ask questions like:  “What is my authority?” “To whom do I report?” “Does this mean I’ll be relieved of other responsibilities?” “What are my expectations?” The second stakeholder role is the project team, who contribute time, skills, and effort to the project. Deciding who will be part of the project team usually happens during the definition and planning of the project. This selection process is complete when the team members have agreed to the responsibilities and roles of the project. Often identifying the team members is easy on small projects and is difficult on large projects. The third stakeholder role is the management, refers to functional management or line management. They are responsible for organization unit like “Engineering” or “Internal Audit” rather than a specific project. As project managers describe the functional managers as they help in “getting the right people at the right time” and “timely decisions based on the facts presented by the project team.” Functional managers also guide the project manager in identifying which functional managers are perfect for a specific project.

Functional managers are management support, corresponding to their:  (1) sponsorship, a specific one with a formal authority who is responsible for the project, he may be a senior executive or a junior manager, he may use his power on behalf of the project manager that the project manager often lacks, provide advice, or influence project priority, responsible for the success of the project, his primary task is to help the project manager and project team be successful and his contribution to a project is his or her authority (see duties  of a sponsor on page 47); (2) resources, functional managers who assign specific people and resources to a project, project manager must work closely with functional managers, once the project manager designs a work plan that details the skills required for the project-he is ready to identify the managers of other departments involved who are responsible for the workers of those departments, and the managers must approve the statement of work (SOW) and the project plan; and (3) decision authority, identifying the managers who make decisions can be tricky, for managers like whose operations will be affected by the outcome of the project, and for managers representing other stakeholders like customers, project manager needs to identify the less obvious ones, such as those with veto authority.

The fourth stakeholder role is the customer. Customer pays for a project such as:  product, description, budget, and the criteria by which success will be measured. In this case, the project manager should break the customer role into two primary contributors: those who supply requirements and those who provide funding to accurately identify the customer. The fifth stakeholder role is the representatives of external constraints. They are the federal, state, and local government agencies who have laws and regulations that affecting all facets of our lives. Many stakeholders involve with their representatives on all kinds of projects. The stakeholders are may have their own requirements that the team members must understand. The sixth stakeholder role is the advocates, opponents, and innocent bystanders. Consider more than obvious stakeholders that are involved a much wider audience. The people and organizations may become advocates or opponents that the team members must understand their stake.