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An overview of stakeholder roles and responsibilities

Stakeholder management is one of the key knowledge areas for project managers to consider. It is an iterative, everyday interaction with a variety of different roles, responsibilities, and requirements. Some stakeholders will be on the project from the second it begins until they sign off on its completion. Others may come and go as project needs dictate.

When a business case is created, there are already multiple key stakeholders involved. Once the project request has begun, it is typical for the project manager to begin to identify the project stakeholders and begin crafting a plan to engage, communicate, and work on the requirements necessary for the project to be successful.

At this point in the project, there may only be a business case completed and a project selected, so the list of stakeholders may include the project sponsor, the customer, and the business analysts who crunched the financial numbers. It is important for you, as the project manager, to be able to understand or even explain the major characteristics of the project well enough to identify which stakeholders may be involved now or in the future.

In order to do so, it's important to understand the business need the project is addressing, to clarify the goals and objectives as much as possible, and describe the correlation between the business need and the product service or result.

That sounds like a lot of information to assemble when you don't really have a lot of information yet. The good news is you will not be doing this in a vacuum. As you'll see in the next section, there are a variety of stakeholders that you can communicate with to gather the information that you need. In some cases, you are a contributor to the business case or considered a subject matter expert utilizing your expert judgment and may already have a good understanding of the scope of work and the stakeholders currently involved.

In Chapter 4, Developing a Project Charter, you'll delve more into the kick-off of a project and where to find the information you need once you are formally assigned to begin project work. For now, you will review the different roles of project stakeholders and create a stakeholder matrix to keep track of the information you'll need to collect requirements and engage stakeholders.

One thing to keep in mind is that stakeholders encompass a lot of different roles and responsibilities, and there could be numerous people and organizations you will work with to try to figure out what the project requirements should be. Some stakeholders will have more influence or power on the project to make changes or adapt the scope of work or even cancel the project. Other stakeholders may have more interest in how the project is progressing. Still others will have a high level of influence and a high level of interest in the day-to-day from the beginning of the project until the end. Managing stakeholder expectations is a delicate balance and is one of the more important skills a project manager can have.

On the exam, some stakeholders may be described as end users, but keep in mind these end users are not consumers who purchase a product after it has entered the product life cycle. End users would be people who have requirements and would be involved in the project life cycle.