Anyone who consumes your services or products are stakeholders to your project or operation.
Putting in more effort to identify all your stakeholders from the onset has many advantages for a project or an operation.
- Number of changes (in scope and schedule) are reduced in project. Scope change happens when newly identified stakeholders request for certain features to be added or tighter schedule to meet their business needs.
- Improved communication which leads to higher customer satisfaction. If you do not know who consumes your services, you will end up “neglecting” some group of users. For example, if you plan for a maintenance window, you have to inform all your stakeholders regarding the activities and the associated impacts. Anyone not in the loop may results in unnecessary business disruptions and revenue losses.
- Project budget is more realistic with more stakeholders participation in the cost estimation process. Budget padding will be minimized since less assumptions are made on behalf of other “unidentified” stakeholders.
- More stakeholders = More risks can be identified. This translates to more predictable and manageable project/operation.
- Useful reports can be generated when all stakeholders’ interests are taken into consideration. Performance metrics are predefined together with stakeholders. Never generate a report that no one is interested to read.
Identifying stakeholders in a project is a progressive activity. In an operation, however, the challenge is that there are new consumers of your services which you may not be aware of. The only time you know you have a new stakeholder in operations is when you receive complains. This will be discussed in future articles focusing on operations management.
| 
