Project stakeholder management

Project stakeholders are those individuals who are both under and beyond a project manager's authority, individuals such as project team members and contractors as well as customers and those directly and indirectly affected by the project's outcome, such as residents of an entire neighborhood in the case of large construction projects. This article examines project stakeholder management as a process for managing the impact of project decisions on all stakeholders throughout a project's life cycle. In doing so, it describes a strategy for assessing the influence of project stakeholders external to the project--both the supportive and the adverse--and a technique for managing these individuals. It details five cases showing the influence that outside stakeholders had on project outcomes and five cases depicting the approaches that project sponsoring organizations used to manage stakeholder concerns. It then outlines four premises for developing an approach to managing stakeholders.