G.P.Sudhakar: Which Stakeholders interact with Project Manager?

There are many stakeholders which interact with project manager in his day to day activities. All these stakeholders are interested in selected information of the project. Not all information is needed by everybody. The project manager has to control what information is flowing to which stakeholder. In this article, we will see who are the stakeholders affecting the project manager in day to day life and what is their role with respect to the project. All these stakeholders are important because they are affected by the success or failure of the project.

Stakeholders Interacting

The main stakeholders who interact with the project manager are team members, project sponsor, senior management, quality team, support team, vendors, contractors, customers, users, marketing team, and any other stakeholders which are affected by the result of the project. Their interaction is as shown in the figure.

Team Members

They are also known as Project Team. They are the people directly report to the project manager. Definitely they interact with the project manager daily. Project manager is involved in selecting the team, recruiting the team, objectives setting, performance appraisals of the team. He delegates the work to the team members. He monitors and controls the progress of the work.

Project Sponsor

Project Sponsor is interested in the progress of the project. He is interested in success of the project. Because he is the person who invests money for the project, definitely he would like to interact with the project manager on regular intervals. He will suggest the manager in case of schedule overrun and cost overruns. That is whether to continue the project or to close the project.

Senior Management

These people are interested in the review of the project. Usually senior management review meetings happen in all most all IT organizations. In these meetings the project manager shows the progress of the project with the help of project metrics. Senior management is interested in details such as effort spent, defects statistics, productivity, etc. All these details are to be provided by the project manager in senior management review meetings. He may have to tell his resource acquisition plans as well.

Quality team

These are the people who will give green signal to release the product or the result of the project. Quality control is done by the quality team. Where as, project manager has lot of control in the quality assurance stage. Definitely these quality people will be in touch with the project manager in dealing with the process related matters. The quality people involve the project manager in quality audits and quality assurance activities.

Support team

Once the product is released into the market, the support team work starts from there. The product engineering team hands over the product to the support team when the release happens. Once product release happens, the support team is responsible in responding to customer queries. These support people take the knowledge transfer from the product engineering team and the project manager. That’s how support team interacts with the project manager. Also in case of support team not able to handle the customer queries, it will be forwarded to the project manager. Then the project manager has to respond to the customer requests with the help of his engineering team.

Vendors

Vendors are the people who take some chunk of work from the performing organization. The project manager selects the vendors based on the vendor selection criteria. Once vendors are selected they are given some work on contract basis or time and material basis.

Contractors

These are the people who sit at the project manager’s location and execute the project. Usually the project manager pays to these contractors on hourly or daily basis. They work at the performing organization for a fixed time period based on their contracts with the performing organization.

Customers

Definitely the project manager will be communicating with the customers regularly. The customer is interested in weekly and monthly status reports, schedule and cost overruns. The customer has the authority to continue or stop the project.

Users

Users are the people who interact with the systems developed by the project teams. Definitely user feedback is an input to the project manager. In some cases, users are within the organization or some cases the user may be outside the performing organization. The user feedback is very important in framing the requirements.

Marketing team

These are the people who interact with the customer and then talk to the project manager. These people act as an interface between customer and project manager in some organizations. In product oriented companies, usually product features are driven by the customer needs, wants and expectations. Hence, these are gathered by the marketing team and given to the project manager.

Other stakeholders

There can be many other stakeholders for projects. For example, families of the employees can be stakeholders for some projects. The general public may be the stakeholders for an environment related project. Hence, identification of stakeholders is an important activity a project manager needs to concentrate. This is a continuous process.

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G.P.Sudhakar, MCA, M.Tech, EMBA, PMP

Product Manager

Canarys Automations Ltd

Bangalore

India

purna24@hotmail.com

Cell: +91-9900728687

About the Author:

The author has over 11 years experience in IT industry. He works as Product Manager at Canarys Automations Ltd, Bangalore. He has Bachelor of Science, Master of Computer Applications, Master of Technology and Executive MBA from India. He is Project Management Institute, USA certified Project Management Professional (PMP). He worked in USA, UK, Ireland, Finland and India as IT and Management Consultant. He worked as employee or Consultant to companies such as IBM, SIEMENS, Interwoven, Wipro Technologies, Citicorp, Nokia, Salomon Smith Barney, SIAC, DSET Corporation, IONA Technologies, Birla-Horizons International, and PCL Mindware. He has few publications in Management. His articles were published in The Hindu, Indian Management, Express Computer, Businessgyan, The SmartTechie, PM Essence, Business & Management, The Global Educator, Computers Today and CSI Communications. He has interests in both technology and management.

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