PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Managing Stakeholders Need

Meeting Stakeholders Needs

Introduction

In today's world, businesses have become ever so competitive. An organisation, wishing to deliver, has to manage a wide range of stakeholders. Whether the company offers a new product or a service, the company has to tailor the project according to stakeholders' requirements. In this regard, the most important thing is identifying the stakeholders. The process of stakeholder management begins with identifying, and prioritising stakeholders specific to a project. Stakeholders can either be internal or external to a project. The internal stakeholders are typically easy to manage because they have background knowledge of organisational culture. The external stakeholders require most of the efforts from identification to management. It is essential to understand the role of stakeholders in relation to a project success. There can be a number of stakeholders in a project; investors, employees, competitors, communities, and government authorities. Stakeholders are individuals, and organisations who have a claim to a project.

In this regard, a project manager has to develop team plans for managing stakeholders' needs. It is necessary that team objectives are mapped against the stakeholders' requirements. Further, it is essential that a work plan accommodates the needs of multiple stakeholders. For that matter, prioritisation of stakeholders must be effectively managed. This report demonstrates the process of meeting the stakeholders' needs. The write up begins with identification of stakeholders of a project. The discussion elaborates the measures taken to ensure that the requirements are fulfilled. Towards the end, the report presents a plan for improving the work plan processes.

Discussion

Company's Overview

Extreme technologies deal with consumer electronics. They offer a wide range of electronic items, from household electronics to commercial items. Paper shredders, scanners, Sound system, and media players are some of their products. The company has technology partners who provide the back end technology. Recently, the company is determined to strengthen its product line with innovative products. In this regard, the company has planned to launch production of data storage devices. In today's world, large enterprises need an efficient way of data archiving. The need for “deep archiving” has projected the idea of developing Holographic drives. A holographic drive is capable of storing large amount of data in a single drive. It offers high data rate, and 50+ years of reliable storage life. Before starting the project, it is essential to identify the stakeholders, prepare a plan for managing them (Prel et al, 2008, p.444). The project team will align the team tasks according to the projected requirements. This will be done through stakeholder analysis.

1.1: Identification of stakeholders

There are two aspects of identifying stakeholders;

Identification of individuals and organisations those are likely to have an impact on the project

Identification of individuals and organisations those are likely to be impacted by the project.

The first category comprises of government authorities, technology partners, and investors. The main idea is to gather input from the stakeholders, and predict project design (Billows, 2008, p.7). The possible stakeholders can be one or many from the following;

Figure 1: Possible Stakeholders ...