The key roles
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• • • •
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giving support and guidance to: – planning; – estimating; – project control; planning resource utilization; maintaining awareness of the status of supported projects; supervising the performance of resources; demonstrating concern for the on-time completion of projects.
A new term has appeared here: stakeholders. Stakeholders are the people who have a specific and clearly definable interest in your project – a stake, in gambling terms! They are an important group of people, as we shall see a little later in this chapter. Of course, only the primary responsibilities are set out on the above lists, which can be expanded considerably for a particular organization. All of these roles are important to success in project work. You can see how a coordinated project community can develop in the organization and you are part of that structure now as a programme or project manager. It is appropriate to define some other terms you will use frequently in managing a programme or project.
THE STAKEHOLDERS A stakeholder is any person or group that has an interest, can influence or be impacted by the programme or project. It is relatively easy to identify the stakeholders external to your organization. Many external people are expecting to have work from your project – suppliers, contractors, consultants and possibly government departments or agencies. Anyone inside the organization who potentially at some time has an interest in your project is a stakeholder. You need to identify these people because they are certain to attempt to exert influence about how you manage the project. The team members come from different functions and their line managers have agreed to lose their resource for some of the working weeks ahead. The line managers are often key stakeholders – they can have a significant impact on your project if their priorities change and you lose a promised resource. Other key stakeholders include: • • • •
your customer; your sponsor; the customer’s user group; the finance department.