Chapter 5

The project manager, sponsor and

other stakeholders
 Learning objectives
• identify, organise and categorise a wide variety of project stakeholders
• explain the relationship between the project manager and other
stakeholders
• differentiate and discuss the role of the project manager from three
perspectives
• generate balanced selection criteria for key project management
appointments
• discuss the changing role of major stakeholders throughout the project
life cycle
• analyse and evaluate a sponsor’s ability to fulfil its obligations
• understand and argue the importance of shared expectations in a project
• perform a step-by-step approach to stakeholder analysis
 Project Stakeholders
• Individuals, groups and organisations who are actively involved in the
project or whose interests may be positively or negatively affected as a
result of the project
• In this chapter the following roles are examined:
– Project manager
– Sponsor (or client or owner)
– Project board (or steering committee)
– Finance providers
– Project champion
– Consultant
– Performing organisation
– Customer (or end user)
– Project support office
 Leadership role of the project
manager
• Who is the project manager
• The responsibilities of a project manager
– Overall responsibility
– Early project responsibilities
– Ongoing responsibilities
• Two useful guiding principles:
1. All decisions should be directed towards
achieving the project objectives.
2. Only the remaining work in the project can
be managed.
 A project manager must…
• Sell the project idea
• Meet the needs of the sponsor
• Meet the needs of the other stakeholders
• Manage the project life cycle
Core competencies required by
project managers
Soft skills: Hard skills:
– Leading – Planning
– Communicating – Scheduling
– Negotiating – Controlling
– Problem-solving
– Influencing the
organisation
 The project sponsor
• The project sponsor pays for the project; the end
users enjoy the benefits of the project.
• Sponsors can be:
– Private individuals
– Several private individuals
– Corporate
– Government
– Mixed government-private
– Multinational
 Senior management
• Decide whether the project will proceed
• Determine the extent of support the project
will receive relative to other projects

• The project manager needs the participation

of senior management
 The project board
• A group of people, usually from within the
sponsor’s organisation, who have been given
responsibility for making executive-level
decisions on behalf of the sponsor, throughout the
project
• Oversees the planning and execution of the project
• Meets regularly with the project manager to
review project progress and consider issues that
cannot be resolved by the project manager
 The project champion
• Someone who grasps the benefits of and is enthusiastic
about the project
• Role is typically non-traditional and often contains one
or more of the following elements:
– Cheerleader
– Visionary
– Politician
– Risk taker
– Ambassador
 Consultants and contractors
• Consultants role is to • Contractors are
act on behalf of the external participants
client to deliver a doing the work on a
service, usually with project and are
deliverables in the commonly referred to
form of (Turner, 1995): as
– Advice – Contractors
– Information – Subcontractors
– Assignments – Sub-subcontractors
 The importance of managing
expectations
• Dissatisfied or disillusioned stakeholders
can cause a project to fail

• Managing stakeholders perceptions and

expectations is about generating agreement
and harmony between the different views
and beliefs they hold
 Stakeholder analysis
• A technique that can be used to help identify
project stakeholders and discern their values,
beliefs, assumptions and expectations at the start
of a project
• The stages involved are:
– Identification and analysis
– Mapping stakeholders according to their impact on the
project
– Response and resolution of issues
 Mapping the impact of
stakeholders onto the project
• Once the stakeholders and their expectations have been
identified, they can be organised by mapping them in
relation to their likely impact on the project.
• For example, it is important to know:
– whether or not they are likely to support or oppose the
project
– the power and means available for them to do so
– the predictability of their behaviour and expected level of
interest in the project.
• These factors can be evaluated using matrices
Position/importance matrix
Power/predictability matrix
Power/interest matrix
 From ‘managing’ to
‘collaborating with’ stakeholders
• Stakeholder management emphasises mechanisms
of how an organisation can identify, monitor and
respond to its stakeholders.

• The collaboration approach focuses on building

stakeholder relationships that are reciprocal,
evolving and mutually defined, and that are a
source of opportunity and competitive advantage.
 Summary points
• (please feel free to add here the points from
the text you feel most important for your
students - p. 124)