Business Analysis For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Chapter 3

Identifying and Working with Stakeholders

IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding who participates in projects

Knowing the people in your neighborhood: your stakeholders

Figuring out how best to work with various stakeholders

Striving toward effective communication

Stakeholder is a generic term for a person or a group of people who have an interest in an initiative and will be affected by it (directly or indirectly) or have influence over it. In other words, your stakeholders may not necessarily be a part of your project team, so you may have to think outside the box when identifying them.

Consider a project to create a new application to support order fulfillment. Obviously, the order fulfillment, warehouse, and distribution departments are stakeholders, but how about the internal technical support desk? They aren’t part of the project team, but they’ll be impacted by the initiative because they’ll field technical support questions when the system rolls out. This role makes the people in this group stakeholders.

In this chapter, we discuss working with different stakeholders ...