Stanley E. Portny

A stakeholder’s potential impact on a project depends on the power she can exercise and the interest she has in exercising that power. Assessing the relative levels of each helps you decide with whom you should spend your time and effort to realize the greatest benefits.Power is a person’s ability to influence the actions of others.

At the end of your project, you’ll need to make sure you take care of the necessary administrative issues. Just as you must have authorization for people to legally spend time, effort, and resources to perform work on your project, you must rescind this authorization when you close the project to ensure that people won’t continue to spend time, effort, or resources on it in the future.

A stakeholder register template is a predesigned stakeholder register that contains typical categories and stakeholders for a particular type of project. You may develop and maintain your own stakeholder register templates for tasks you perform, functional groups may develop and maintain stakeholder register templates for tasks they typically conduct, or your organization’s project management office may develop and maintain templates for the entire organization.

Sometimes a terrific idea for a project just pops into your head. However, though you always want to allow for unplanned, spontaneous creativity, most successful organizations choose to pursue a more carefully thought-out process for investigating those information sources that’ll most likely highlight projects that will be of greatest value to them.

When you begin a project, you always feel the pressure to jump in and start working immediately to meet the aggressive time schedules. Although you’re not exactly sure where to start, you know you have the greatest chance of success if you plan out your project before you begin the actual work. Answer these ten questions to make sure you’ve completely identified all the work your project will require.

Following your project all the way through to completion helps ensure that everyone gets the maximum benefits from your project’s results. You also get the chance to compare your project’s benefits with the costs incurred, confirm the company’s return on investment, and validate its process for selecting projects.

As part of successfully finishing your own project, you need to help your team members complete their project responsibilities and move on to their next assignments. Handling this transition in an orderly and agreed-upon fashion allows people to focus their energies on completing their tasks on your project instead of wondering where and when their next assignments will be.