Stakeholders: Definition and Importance in Project Management

What Are Stakeholders?

Stakeholders can be individuals, groups or organisations that have an interest in a project or may influence or be affected by its activities and outcomes. Their influence can be either positive or negative.

Stakeholders may include clients, project team members, suppliers, regulatory authorities, manufacturers, laboratories, investors and other parties involved in or affected by the project.

How Can Stakeholders Affect a Project?

Stakeholders can influence many aspects of a project, including:

Scope and Requirements
They may introduce, modify or remove project requirements.

Schedule
They can help accelerate activities or cause delays to important project stages.

Cost
They may reduce planned expenditure or introduce additional requirements and resources.

Project Team
They can influence access to the people, knowledge and expertise required to deliver the project.

Quality
Stakeholders may define or require specific quality standards.

Risk
They can influence risk thresholds and participate in risk management activities.

Outcomes and Benefits
They can enable or prevent activities required to achieve the intended outcomes and help define the value the project is expected to deliver.

Stakeholder Engagement

Stakeholders can change throughout the project lifecycle. Their level of interest, influence and impact can also change over time.

Effective stakeholder engagement helps the project team understand stakeholders' interests, concerns and expectations and address them throughout the project. This is particularly important for stakeholders with significant influence over the project.

Stakeholders in Cosmetic Product Development

A cosmetic product development project can involve many different stakeholders, including the brand owner, formulators, packaging suppliers, testing laboratories, manufacturers, regulatory specialists and other service providers.

Coordinating these stakeholders and maintaining effective communication between them is an important part of managing a cosmetic development project.

References

The Standard for Project Management and A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide), Seventh Edition.

‍