Project Mandatory Documentation: Project Stakeholder List

Documentation is like sex; when it's good, it's very, very good, and when it's bad, it's better than nothing.
--Dick Brandon

Definition: A Stakeholder is a person (or a group of people) involved in a certain project's implementation: be him/her a decision maker, a technical contributor, a high-importance supplier, a manager, a quality engineer, a tester, an integrator, a customer, etc.

Having a list like this is crucial for time saving when needing an answer, an input, a resource assigned, etc.

The Project's Stakeholders List is not a difficult to mantain document, especially when some directory applications or something similar are available in the organization. When nothing like this is present, then, even Outlook can be very useful - for getting the internal stakeholder's data updated.

When no automated framework is used for the projects documentation, a simple excel file can store all the needed information.

An usual way to get the excel is to perform what they call a "Stakeholder Analysis". Mainly, this consists of executing a couple of steps:

• Identify all the people that affect or are affected by your project (see the definition above)
• For each stakeholder, list the roles he/she has in the project
• For each stakeholder, list the responsibilities he/she has in the project
  
• For each stakeholder, rate the impact he/she has on your project (this column may be left blank at the beginning of the project and updated when having all the date) - from 1 to 5, for example
• When applicable, for a stakeholder, list the inputs/approaches he/she needs in order to support you more
• Complete the list with the contact details for each of the stakeholder and with the names of his/her manager and his/her replacer
• The most important thing with a list like this is to be sure that all the people listed there know about their roles and responsibilities, so, their acknowledgement is mandatory.

Finally you'll get to something like this: