. Identify organizational stakeholders.
The first step in stakeholder analysis is to identify who your stakeholders are. Think of all the people within the organization who are impacted by your work, who have influence over it, or have a stake in its successful completion. For example, imagine a project to redesign the item page for a large ecommerce vendor such as Amazon. Amazon has a crowded page for each item, with many components visible within a given page. If each of these page components represents a business unit that wants a presence on that page, then multiple product managers will be impacted by any changes to the page.
Projects will succeed or fail primarily based on the actions of people who care enough to defend or oppose them.
Asking what the organizational challenges are to a particular project is an excellent way to identify key stakeholders. Organizational charts can be of some help, but are often not fully representative of patterns of influence within an organization (Marshall, 1999). Initial stakeholder meetings can help you identify other stakeholders: in each of your initial meetings, ask about who else might be affected by your project, or might have a strong opinion about it, and try to meet with those people.
Sometimes it is difficult to get meetings with influential stakeholders. In this case, the best substitute for a face-to-face meeting is to schedule interviews with a subordinate of the stakeholder. If your project is truly of interest to the stakeholder, the subordinate will be familiar with the stakeholder’s position on the issue and will, in effect, be representing the stakeholder on that issue, much as a lawyer represents a client. Meeting with the subordinate will get you the information you need, and the stakeholder will feel that they have had input into your project.