Subject areaProcess and organisation
A stakeholder is the person, function or organisation with an interest at stake in a project or a company, who therefore influences its choices or bears their consequences.
Internal stakeholders are top management, teams and individual employees; external ones are customers, suppliers, agencies, investors, institutions and local communities.
The concept helps you see who needs to be involved before deciding. Each stakeholder group has its own vocabulary and priorities, which is why the same insights must be translated for non-technical audiences. Hence its weight in change management and governance: a project that aligns its stakeholders early builds trust, one that discovers them halfway meets resistance.
An example
A chemical company introduces a new CRM. Besides the sales team, who will use it, the stakeholders are IT (the information systems department), who maintains it, finance, who receives its data, and the data protection officer: ignoring any one of them slows the project exactly at the point where that stakeholder comes into play.
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Enrico Giubertoni. Licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0: you may quote, translate and adapt this entry with the author’s name and a link, stating any changes. For commercial use, write to info@enricogiubertoni.com
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