Project management principles and practices

¶ … components of successful project management is the ability of managers to effectively assess the concerns of various stakeholders, or those parties with a vested interest in the project, while balancing those concerns with the project's primary priorities. Cultivating positive relationships with the stakeholders whose lives a project may affect is an extremely useful skill to develop as a project manager, and the external resource entitled Your Role in Building Stakeholder Relationships which was received during this course served to emphasize this point. This handout presented a training module for council members tasked with guiding the University of Missouri Extension project, observing that "a stakeholder is someone who is involved with an organization and therefore has responsibilities towards it and an interest in its success" before reminding council members to "understand their role in: establishing and maintaining positive relationships with Extension's stakeholders, including county commissioners and other county officeholders; state and federal legislators" (Brambaugh, 2005). While the importance of recognizing and reacting to stakeholder input has been covered exhaustively by project management researchers, an article published in 2008 by Marjolein C. Achterkamp and Janita F.J. Vos refocused its analysis on the specific roles that key stakeholders are capable of playing within the overall project management process.

The comprehensive empirical review contained within the article Investigating the Use of the Stakeholder Notion in Project Management Literature, A Meta-Analysis examines a total of forty-two publications in a meta-analysis of how stakeholder's roles are perceived by project managers. As the authors of the article state explicitly in their introduction, "this article reports the findings of a meta-analysis of these publications (to) show the lack of attention paid to conceptualizing the stakeholder notion in the context of projects as well as to make the notion operational for this context" (Achterkamp & Vos, 2008), a stipulation which separates their research from that of other project management researchers who focus solely on appeasing the interests of stakeholders in the most balanced manner possible. Recognizing that each stakeholder is capable of exerting their influence on the project management process in vastly different capacities, from the simple expression of displeasure voiced by residents affected by a construction project to the political clout wielded by city council members, remains the focus of Achterkamp and Vos' research throughout the article. Ultimately, the pair conclude that this progressive approach to "stakeholder theory shows the importance of an explicit stakeholder classification model plus an identification method as the first steps in stakeholder involvement" (Achterkamp & Vos, 2008), an advisement which is especially applicable today. With the advantages afforded by modern social networking technology, analytics-driven databases, and other technological innovations, project managers are more capable of classifying their stakeholders in terms of relative importance to the project's overall goals. By accurately assessing both the interests that stakeholders value, and their ability to influence the wider decision making process, project managers can effectively mitigate much of the inherent risks.