The four types of stakeholders in a project are users, governance, influencers and providers which this article will discuss. The article will begin its discourse with a definition of stakeholder before moving on to discussing the different types of project stakeholders one by one. What are the 4 types of stakeholders? A stakeholder is an individual or a firm have invested in a particular project and in one way or another, their input, impacts directly, the project’s outcome.
What Are The 4 Types Of Stakeholders? These are Users as stakeholders, Governance as stakeholders, Influencers as stakeholders and Providers as Stakeholders.
1.Users as stakeholders
These are the types of stakeholders that will consume the end products of your project as they are the beneficiaries of whatever it is that project seeks to accomplish after its completion and realization of its objectives. Users can be customers that are essentially a cardinal group of stakeholders or some other internal department in the organisation undertaking the project.
What are the 4 types of stakeholders? for example, in an event where the project is delivering a new software package for your accounts team, the stakeholders eventually would be the accountants in the accounts department of your company.
2. Governance as stakeholders
These are groupings of people who may register their interest in how things are taken care of on the project or programme and fascinated with the project and subsequently come in to offer their professional expertise and guidance until the project is eventually completed. For example, management boards fall under this category as they often have the task to monitor the quality of the project in progress. In governance, auditors, regulators, health and safety top officers are the stakeholders.
3. Influencers as stakeholders
These are individuals who command authority and are power-vested so much so that they are able to influence decisions and as a result, they can change the course of the direction of a particular project in whichever way they deem fit.
Trade unions and lobby groups belong to this category of stakeholders as they are renowned for being endowed with the capabilities to impact the tract of a project, protect and eventually improve the outcome thereof.
4. Providers as Stakeholders
This is the category where suppliers and vendors belong to. Precisely, a supplier’s role is to supply items to a company. Further, the group of providers may also consist of huge number of profiles ranging from corporate partners, temporal contractors, kitchen personnel, and everybody else who offers resources to the project. It is important to note that there are situations where a person or company has to know what are the 4 types of stakeholders and can fall into more than one category. For instance, the staff can sometimes be both users and influencers.
How to Do A Stakeholder Analysis
Once your project charter is finalized and the scope of your project defined, you can begin to outline your stakeholders.
Identification of Stakeholders
Identification of stakeholders is the preliminary step determining who your stakeholders really are. To conduct this, you will need to use your project summary, project plans and other necessary documentation to come up with a complete list of project stakeholders, both internal and external.
Keep in mind that some stakeholders do not come into play until later in the project life cycle – but if you can predict who they will be, you can start to keep them engaged, build relationships from the start, and help them feel engaged from the start.
Prioritize Stakeholders
Once the process of identifying all the stakeholders has been completed, prioritizing them is the subsequent step. This step is essential as it assists the project understand where the resources ought to be invested. Prioritizing also helps the project manager to establish the key decision makers at any given period and ensures he or she is communicating with the right people, and at the appropriate time.
Understand your stakeholders
For key stakeholders, this may involve a face-to-face meeting or discussion where you discuss matters such as:
What is their definition of project success?
Do they have any concerns or objections about the project or its results?
What are the positive or negative impacts of the project results on them?
Are there any expected conflicts of interest with other stakeholders that you should be aware of?
The conversations that are had will not only help you understand the involvement of each stakeholder and their perspective on the project, but it will also help you create a more comprehensive picture of your stakeholder network and how each stakeholder is connected. And on a personal level, meeting key stakeholders early in the project will help you get a feel for some basic interpersonal preferences such as communication style, and build relationships with each stakeholder.
Managing Stakeholders Stakeholder identification and their needs thereof, is only part of the stakeholder management jigsaw. For a project to be successful, the needs of your key stakeholders, project objectives, and satisfaction should be a constant concern in the entire project timeframe. However, that does not necessarily entail that stakeholders are always in the right, and your job as a project manager is sometimes to ignore your stakeholders and align their expectations with the project summary and plan that you all agreed on up front.
Conclusion
As can be seen from this article, stakeholders are very much important to a project as without them, there is certainly no reason the project scope should exist in the first place. Therefore, it is safe to say that stakeholders are the reasons projects are undertaken.
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