Stakeholders
This section contains course syllabus regarding stakeholders. The following should be read and understood in order to create a stakeholder.
What is a Stakeholder
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A Stakeholder is a person, group, or organization that has a direct
or indirect stake in an organization because it can affect or be
affected by the organization's actions, objectives, and policies.
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Whether or not a project will be considered a success or a failure is
determined by the stakeholders alone.
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After a failure, it is irrelevant whose fault it is, it still is a failure.
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Pointing to contracts, standards, specifications etc. will not change the
perception.
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Even a court ruling in favor of a supplier will not change the client’s
perception.
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So, to make your project a success, you need to convince the
stakeholders.
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Delivering a poor product will make it very very hard to convince the client
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Delivering a great product helps, but it’s no guarantee.
Who are the Stakeholders?
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Key stakeholders in a business organization include
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management, employees, shareholders;
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customers, government agencies, creditors, suppliers, and trade unions;
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They are often classified as internal/external.
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Organizations developing and running software have additional
internal stakeholders that must be considered.
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E.g. Developers/maintainers, data center operation personnel.
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Their job effectiveness strongly depends on their motivation, so they have
considerable power in the project.
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Only if they all work together will development efforts be
successful

Stakeholder Aspects

Stakeholder Management
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For every stakeholder you should define what their stakes are, and
how they may be engaged, that is, measures to
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Find out about their concerns and problems, early and reliably;
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Let them provide input to the project in a chanelled way;
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Provide them with information about the projects progress and issues;
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Track and Manage their expectations.
Practical Tips
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Consider all stakeholders
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Even presumably unimportant stakeholders must be considered.
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Failure to this may be considered as evidence for lack of due diligence.
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Making a wrong assessment is a mistake, not making an assessment is neglience.
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A set of 5-10 stakeholders is usually sufficient.
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Stakeholders with different importance cannot be merged.
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Preparation vs. Presentation
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A summary table is suitable for an oral presentation.
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Adding (a selection of) detail descriptions for important stakeholders is good
practice for a written presentation.
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For conducting the analysis, however, different formats may be more appropriate
(e.g. spreadsheets, unstructured text, posters, …)
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Using a tabular schema for all aspects will help you avoid inadvertent omissions,
similarities, and inconsistent assessments.
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Think of real people
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If you consider the communication between a stakeholder and the project, it may
be helpful to think of concrete persons talking to each other which representthem,
e.g. the mayor of Tårbæk for the client and the Project leader for the
project, or some librarian as a user and a developer for the project.