An essential part of project management is to ensure that key stakeholders are identified early and their expectations managed so that they remain fully supportive of the project and its proposed goals, objectives and outputs. The following questions have to be considered:
• What / who is a stakeholder?
• How should their needs and objectives be assessed?
• How should potential conflicts be managed or identified?
• What power does each stakeholder have?
The involvement of all stakeholders should be managed in order to gain a thorough understanding of the project requirements (outputs specifications). All key stakeholders should be involved in the clarification and confirmation of their requirements so that all requirements are met in the outline design and ultimately the detailed design. For example it is especially important that facilities management requirements are addressed in a design solution, therefore early facilities management involvement is essential. The work required to deliver the objectives also need to be identified. Failure to sufficiently identify, clarify and agree the requirements of a project early will result in an optimism bias close to the upper bound or even abandonment of the project in extreme cases.
Implementation barriers will result if key project stakeholders' expectations are not effectively managed. Examples of implementation barriers are implementation delays due to key stakeholder requirements not being met, mistrust, anger, marginalisation, indecision, lack of support, and rejection of the final product. Stakeholder requirements should be reviewed on a regular basis as they may change as the project progresses.
At each of the decision-making points during the project life-cycle, the stakeholders will have an input to contribute. Therefore, it is essential that all stakeholders are identified and participate in the early stages of procurement, and effective stakeholder management is applied to identify and agree the requirements for the project. For example, the early stage of defence equipment projects are influenced by various stakeholders, both inside and outside the MoD with an interest in the project outcomes (i.e. the Defence Procurement Agency, the Head of Defence Export Services, scientists, the users, industry and more).
Large projects have a hierarchy of requirements. There are business requirements at the top level, then requirements for the new facility/system/equipment and finally project requirements. The lower level requirements must not be completed at the expense of the higher level requirements. For example, in an ICT development project a project team may have a requirement of completing the programming of a module by 19 May, and the deadline can only be met by cutting some corners that violate certain larger system requirements dictated by the business requirements. This would not only compromise the performance (i.e. benefit on completion) but the business requirements will also not be met. Project managers should always consider the business requirements.