Stakeholder Analysis

Stakeholder technique · See it on the map

Runnable here

Finding everyone with a stake in the project, and recording what each one wants and can affect.

When to use it

At project start, and again at every major phase change or scope shift. Use it whenever the cast of people who care about the project is bigger, or less obvious, than the org chart suggests.

When to avoid it

On a small, contained project with an obvious and stable set of stakeholders, a full analysis is overhead — a short list on a page does the same job. Avoid running it once at kickoff and calling it done: a register that is never revisited goes stale the moment the project's shape changes, and a stale register is worse than none because it looks authoritative.

Steps

1. List everyone with formal authority over the project first: sponsor, governance board, budget owner.
2. Widen the net past the org chart: ask who has to approve, use, maintain, inspect, or live next to what the project produces.
3. Deliberately look for people with no formal role who can still stop the work — a regulator, a union rep, an end user with informal veto power, a team that will quietly deprioritize your dependency.
4. For each stakeholder, record interest (how much they care about the outcome) and influence (how much power they have over it).
5. Group stakeholders by interest and influence and decide an engagement approach for each group, not each individual.
6. Set a review cadence — tied to phase gates, not a fixed calendar date — and revisit the register at each one.

What it produces

• A stakeholder register listing each stakeholder with interest and influence recorded.
• An engagement approach per stakeholder group.
• A scheduled point to revisit the register as the project changes.

Common pitfalls

• Only listing people already attending meetings, so the analysis just confirms who you already knew about.
• Treating the register as a one-time kickoff artifact and never updating it as the project's stakeholders change — a new vendor, a reorg, a regulator who shows up in month six all go unrecorded.
• Missing the informal stakeholder with no title but real power to delay or block the work, because the search stopped at the org chart.

Worked example

A team replacing a warehouse's inventory system lists the obvious stakeholders — sponsor, warehouse manager, IT — and stops there. A stakeholder analysis session surfaces two more: the third-shift forklift crew, who were never consulted and will refuse to use a system that slows down picking, and the fire marshal, whose sign-off on the new floor layout is required before go-live. Both get added to the register with high influence, and the rollout plan changes to include a shift-floor pilot and an early fire-code review.

Source

• PMBOK-6 §13.1.2.3

Where it comes from: this technique is named by the PMBOK Guide, 6th edition.