Who are your stakeholders?

Okay next up on the project is the stateholder groups. I've split these into three groups

1. Sponsors and Blockers
2. Enablers
3. Informed or Enabled

The first group are those people who if you don't get them properly engaged and deliver what they want they the project will fail, or be seen to have failed, these tend to be the key high-level people who will ultimately judge the success of the solution. They are also the people who can make it much easier or harder for you depending on their expectations of the project.

The second group are the people who will actually help you get things done, this means they will personally help you get things moving and need to be directly involved in the actual work of the project. The project might be changing what they do or they might be the manager or customer of the people who will be changing their practices as a result of your project. They aren't direct blockers from on-high like the previous group but they need to feel actively involved in the project or it will be an outside thing being imposed on them.

The last group are the people who will either be told about what you are doing or will actually be impacted once the solution is live. So they might be the users of the old system you are replacing, the people in the warehouse who will have to cope with the new shelf stacking process or just senior people who like to feel they are in the first group but who in reality have no impact on your programme but you must keep sweet. Needless to say don't tell these senior people that you have lobbed them in this group.

The importance of getting your stakeholder management right is essential to the project. One of the bits from a business SOA perspective that I always stress is getting people's motivations clear about the service and this is an approach I apply to the project.

Why do the sponsors want to be engaged? What will they get out of it? What won't they like?

Repeat for the different groups and you now have a clear picture of the external factors on the project and you can start making plans to ensure that you meet the stakeholder objectives.

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