Stakeholders are people who will somehow be affected –positively or negatively-- by your migration project. In a typical migration, you will be able to identify stakeholders that perceive the project with great enthusiasm: they know that having their applications moved to newer technologies will improve their work, making them more productive as developers and even as end users. On the other hand, some stakeholders will be afraid of the results of the migration project. For example, some developers may fear that their skills will become obsolete in the new software platform, while some managers may worry about the possible disruption that the transition to the new system may generate, and some end users may want to minimize the learning curves that the new version of the application may mean to them.
In an organizational context, you can’t execute a project without taking stakeholders into account. Sooner or later, they will show up in your project to influence it according to their needs or preferences, which in turn may result in helpful support or frustrating disapproval.
The first step that you have to take regarding stakeholders is identifying them. Look around you and identify those people that in some way will be affected by the migration project. Make a list of identified stakeholders, then try to identify their interests and the way in which the project may cause an impact to each one of them.
A key word in stakeholder management is communication. You will be able to deal with the different stakeholders in your project if you learn how to communicate with each one of them, and this is what we will cover in the next few posts.