Friday, January 23, 2015

Lack of Stakeholder Ownership

Why Projects Really Fail
Project stakeholders are defined as anyone with a vested interest in a project. They can have a positive interest (they will benefit from the project) or a negative interest (they see some disadvantage from the project) but they are still stakeholders. They can help or hinder a project and as project managers we neglect them at our peril.

But if the stakeholders don’t actually care about the project or take any responsibility or interest in it, then why is the project being carried out? This 'cause of failure' is closely linked with poor communication and top management support. A wise project manager communicates with all the project stakeholders (including the negative ones) and makes sure they understand the reason for and are committed to the project. It would seem that a lack of stakeholder ownership is a sign of an unnecessary project and just another symptom of poor project management.

The Project
David has now got his own copy of InDesign and is taking over editing the material directly, rather than giving me the changes to edit. I can see the advantage to him in this and will do my best to give him any support he needs, but the timescale was already quite tight so I hope he can cope with a steep learning curve.

1 comment:

Procademy Software said...

Check out the article on Stakeholders and Project Management at blog.procademysoftware.com. It has some great insights related to this article.