This article was excerpted from Microsoft® Office Project 2003 Inside Out by Teresa S. Stover. Visit Microsoft Learning to buy this book. View other articles written by Teresa Stover.

Understanding project stakeholders

Every project has a set of stakeholders associated with it. Project stakeholders are individuals or organizations who are somehow connected to the project and can influence the project's outcome. As the project manager, you need to be able to work with different types of stakeholders in various ways. A stakeholder can do the following:

• Be actively involved in the work of the project.
• Exert influence over the project and its outcome (also known as managing stakeholders).
• Have a vested interest in the outcome of a project.

There are a variety of stakeholder categories, each supported in its own way by Microsoft Project. The categories are as follows:

• Project manager   Microsoft Project directly supports the project manager with its scheduling, tracking, and communication capabilities.
• Team members   The stakeholders executing the project are supported minimally through e-mail communication with their project manager. In a more comprehensive manner, team members are supported through Microsoft Project Web Access, in which they can view their assigned tasks, send and receive task updates, send status reports, and review the project as a whole.
• Team leads   Team leads can use Project Web Access to delegate and manage tasks.
• Project resource manager   A resource manager might work in concert with the project manager to help acquire and maintain necessary resources. Through Project Web Access, a resource manager can analyze resource utilization information.
• Senior managers, executives, or sponsors   People who lead the organization in implementing the project or supply the project budget or other resources can use Project Web Access to review high-level project summaries. In an enterprise environment, executives can review a summary comparing multiple projects being carried out throughout the organization. Such individuals are also known as managing stakeholders.

Managing stakeholders can influence the planning processes of a project and help set the expectations and assumptions of the project. Sometimes the expectations of different stakeholders conflict with one other. It is the job of the project manager to balance and reconcile these conflicts well before project execution begins.

Managing stakeholders might also impose new requirements that require adjustments to the finish date, budget, or scope. Even if this happens in the midst of execution, you can use Microsoft Project to make adjustments responding to the new demands.

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About the author   Award-winning author Teresa Stover has written 11 computer books and countless user manuals, tutorials, and online help systems. She is a project management expert who has served as a consultant to the Microsoft Project team since Version 4. Teresa is the author of Microsoft® Project Version 2002 Inside Out and manages her own technical and business writing consultancy.