ABSTRACT
“Every project has stakeholders who are impacted by or can impact the project in a positive or negative way. Some stakeholders may have a limited ability to influence the project’s work or outcomes; others may have significant influence on the project and its expected outcomes” (PMI, 2017, 504). In this chapter, we are focused solely on processes dealing with stakeholders outside the project team. Recognizing individuals external to the project team as being a major influence of project success is a somewhat new idea. One could feel that this topic has already been covered in the previous chapters on communications management and to some degree this feeling is justified. However, there are some different perspectives to deal with as we focus on this external interface segment. The role of this chapter is to highlight issues involved in managing stakeholder communication and is concerned more as viewed from their impact than in just general communication theory. In this view, the project manager (PM) must negotiate issues the stakeholder raises in such a manner to keep the internally defined project plan requirements aligned with this population’s dynamic views. Therefore, with this perspective we now somewhat alter the management goal of the project team to one of delivering items that are dynamically aligned with this audience and not necessarily the existing project plan that has driven the process up until now. The results of this activity can yield yet another source of formal change requests that the project team seeks.
