Summary: Play Now: This episode is sponsored by The Agile PrepCast. Earn 37 Professional Development Units: It’s imperative that you know your project’s stakeholders. After all, to satisfy a stakeholder need is usually the reason why we undertake projects. That’s why we define stakeholders as a person or organization with an interest in the project’s completion. Think of influential customers, sponsors, the public or your own company that are all involved in the project. Our guest today is Dr. Emad Rahim, DM, PMP (http://www.linkedin.com/in/erahim, @DrEmadRahim) who says that because your stakeholders require you to understand the specifications of a project and to meet their expectations, performing an analysis of who they are is essential. And so our interview focuses on a single activity: Identifying all the stakeholders we have on the project. This is a time-consuming process, and you want to ensure no important stakeholder is missed. And to help you with that, Emad and Cornelius review eight areas that require your attention. You can find the blog post about stakeholder identification here: http://www.coloradotech.edu/resources/blogs/january-2013/stakeholders. Below are the first few pages of the transcript. The complete transcript is available to Premium subscribers only. Podcast Introduction Cornelius Fichtner: Hello and welcome to Episode # 261. This is the Project Management Podcast at www.pm-podcast.com and I am Cornelius Fichtner. Nice to have you with us. It's imperative that you know your project stakeholders. After all to satisfy a stakeholder need is usually the reason why we undertake our projects. That's why we define a stakeholder as a personal organization with an interest in the project's completion. Think of influential customers, sponsors, the public or your own company that are all involved in the project. Our guests today is Dr. Emad Rahim who says that because your stakeholders require you to understand the specifications of a project and to meet their expectations performing an analysis of who they are is essential. And so, our interview focuses on a single activity - identifying all the stakeholders we have on the project. This is a time-consuming process and you want to ensure no important stakeholder is missed. And to help you with that, Emad and I review 8 areas that require your attention. And now, you're getting warmer, warmer, oh yeah, you're getting really hot there. You're about to locate another stakeholder. Enjoy the interview. Podcast Interview Female voice: The Project Management Podcast’s feature Interview: Today with Dr. Emad Rahim, appointed Endowed Entrepreneur-in-residence for Oklahoma State University and Visiting Scholar at Rutgers University. Cornelius Fichtner: Hello Emad and welcome to The Project Management Podcast™! Dr. Emad Rahim: Great to be here! Thank you for having me. Cornelius Fichtner: Oh, you are welcome. Thank you for joining us today! So we want to talk about stakeholders, in particular how to identify stakeholders making sure that we have everybody who is a stakeholder in our project identified. But let's take a step back here first of all and let's define stakeholder. So what is a stakeholder in your definition? Dr. Emad Rahim: Well, stakeholders are people that have a direct or indirect impact on a project. This could be negative or this could be positive. But these people will contribute to the project in some shape or form. Cornelius Fichtner: Okay and why do we need to identify all of them? Dr. Emad Rahim: Well one is to make sure that we have all of the necessary information that is related to the project and also know exactly who are the players are, where the resource is located, who are the clients, what type of materials and content are needed and who do we communicate this information to. So all those things are really needed in order to fully understand who the stakeholders are and the role they play in the project. Cornelius Fichtner: And how time consum
