Identifying Project Stakeholders--Clients

Our focus in this course rests chiefly with maintaining and enhancing client relationships. In most cases, concerning both external and internal clients, the project deals with an investment. The longer the project implementation, the longer the money invested sits without creating any returns. That is why the clients are concerned with receiving the project as quickly as they can possibly get it from the team. As long as costs are not passed on to the client, they are seldom overly interested in how much expense was involved in the project's development. On the other hand, the project, in a lot of cases, started before the client need was fully defined. Product concept screening and clarification will often be part of the project scope of work. This is the reason why the customers seek the right to make suggestions and request alterations in the project's features and operating characteristics for as long as it is possible without jeopardizing their schedule. The customer feels, with justification, that a project is only as good as it is acceptable and is used by them. As a result, this sets a certain flexibility requirement and requires willingness from the project team to make themselves amenable to specification changes.

The other feature when dealing with client groups lies in the fact that it is erroneous to simply use the term "client" under the assumption that it refers to the entire customer organization. As Figure 2.3 shows, the reality is often far more complex. When an organization is charting a stakeholder management strategy for dealing with a customer, that "customer" must first be more specifically identified. A client firm consists of a number of internal interest groups in many cases with highly different agendas operating. For example, our company can readily identify a number of distinct clients within the customer organization, including the top management team, engineering groups, sales teams, on-site teams, manufacturing or assembly groups, and so forth. Under these circumstances it becomes clear that the process of formulating a stakeholder analysis of a customer organization is a potentially highly complex undertaking.

Figure 2.3 Project Stakeholder Groups

Our challenge is further complicated by the divergent expectations and demands of these various customer stakeholder groups. Preparing a presentation to deal with the customer's engineering staff will require highly technical information and solid specification details. On the other hand, the finance and contractual people are looking for entirely different sorts of information. As a result, formulating stakeholder strategies requires us first to acknowledge the existence of these various client stakeholders, and then a coordinated plan for uncovering and addressing each group's specific concerns to their satisfaction.