COEPD – Center of Excellence for Professional Development Happy Learning
A stakeholder is any person or a group of persons or an organisation that is directly or indirectly effected or impacted by proposed IT solution.
These stakeholders usually be grouped into the following categories:-
1.Project Stakeholders:-
People inside your organisation who provide knowledge and expertise necessary to quantify technical and business constraints.
Business Analyst, Project Manager, Development team, Quality Assurance, Testing are some of the Project Stakeholders.
2.Business Stakeholders:-
People who involves in development of Business like Sales and operations of the organisation.
Project Manager, Business Owner, Business Sponsor, Operation team, Executive Sponsor, SPOC are the some of the Business Stakeholders.
- Third Party Stakeholders:-
People outside your organization who provide knowledge and expertise necessary to quantify technical and business constraints.
Auditors, Focus Group, Security Specialist, Outsource are some of the Third Party Stakeholders.
- Negative Stakeholders:-
These Stakeholders do not allow the project to succeed.
Competitor, Hackers, Political Parties , Pressure Group are some of the Negative Stakeholders.
There are number of stakeholders involved in a project. So, stakeholder analysis is the important part or the process while working in a project.
The stakeholder analysis is frequently used during the preparation phase of a project to access the attitudes of the stakeholders regarding the potential changes. Stakeholder analysis can be done once or on a regular basis to track changes in stakeholder’s attitudes overtime. Stakeholder is a systematic way to analyse stakeholders by their power and interest. If the power and interest are high then we can consider them as key Stakeholders.
What is stakeholder analysis?
It is process or technique to identify the key persons whose interest is to be considered in developing a solution.
Steps to be followed to perform stakeholder analysis:
- Identify stakeholders
- Stakeholder listing document
- Stakeholders summary
- RASCI Matrix – Responsible, Accountable, Supporting, Consulted, Informed.
Identify Stakeholders:
This is one of the most important step in the project management as the project are undertaken to satisfy the requirements of a stakeholder.
- Conduct a stakeholder analysis
- Determine if they have been engaged before
- We have to consider the social, technical, economic and political context
- Conduct research to understand stakeholders issues and needs
- Consider how are we going to reach stakeholders, online or offline
Stakeholder listing document:
These are list of documents in which it contains both internal and external stakeholders.
Stakeholder’s summary:
By using this stakeholder summary we can adapt or delete information pertaining to proposed IT solution.
RACI Matrix:
It is one of the technique used for categorization of stakeholders and clarifying the roles and responsibilities of each stakeholder in relation to the proposed IT solution.
R-Responsible: It says about who is completing the task.
A-Accountable: This speaks about who is making decision and taking action on the task’s
C-Consulted: It says about who will be communicated with regarding decision and tasks.
Goal of stakeholder analysis:- The Main Goal of the stakeholder analysis is to develop the cooperation between Stakeholders and Technical team in order to achieve a successful project.
Steps in Stakeholder Analysis:-
Once we have identified all types of stakeholders related to our project, we can begin to analyse them and map them to our criteria. At this stage we need to consider few important factors like
- Who are the stakeholders who have the most influence on our project?
- Which stakeholders will be most affected by our project?
- How should we handle important people who actually won’t be considered as stakeholders?
- Who controls the resources?
Benefits of Stakeholder Analysis:-
When we use the opinions and influence of our most powerful stakeholders to gain information in shaping the project, our project will be better equipped for success.
- We can make better strategies and decisions.
- Save our precious time and money by avoiding people who actually don’t know much about the project outcome.
- When this analysis is conducted before a policy or project is implemented, policymakers and managers can detect and act to prevent misunderstandings about the policy or a project.
