Whether you are in outsourcing or any other kind of business, when doing a project, it is very important to understand who the main stakeholders for the project are. First of all, we need to clarify that the stakeholders are the people who are going to benefit from or lose something in the project. The project team, among others, should also be included in the list of stakeholders by this definition. However, if we take all of the extensive effects of doing nearly any project into account, we will understand that there actually may be a lot of stakeholders. Our main concern is connected with the “key” stakeholders and their identification. The most prevailing technique that can be used is to get seven to ten members of the project team together and then using one of the group dynamics techniques define the names of all the stakeholders for the project.
There is one more technique for stakeholders’ identification that recently gets more and more popularity. It is called the Crawford slip. Under this technique, each person in the group receives ten pieces of paper. Then the facilitator asks the question, “Who is the most important stakeholder in this project?” Each of the group participants must come up with the best response he or she can think of. After a one minute pause the facilitator asks the same question again and so on. Each time the question is asked, the participants must answer the question writing down more and more variants. Each participant cannot use the answer more than once.
