The Project Management Book

A productive stakeholder community

What is this about and why is it important?

One of the biggest bugbears of many project teams is dealing with stakeholders. The effort entailed in managing them can be considerable. In the worst situation, interactions with a project’s stakeholder community are a continuous, counterproductive battle. Stakeholders may micro-manage, interfere, ignore the project’s needs, be indecisive, keep changing the project’s direction, lack consensus, openly mistrust or disregard the project team and so forth. Stakeholder management is then a painful and seemingly pointless overhead on the project. Yet it does not need to be like this. In the best situation, stakeholders actively contribute to the project’s success. What ...