Christian Lang 
Stakeholder Analysis in the Context of Project Management 

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject Computer Science – Commercial Information Technology, grade: 1, 3, Heilbronn University of Applied Sciences, language: English, abstract: Due to the change in our society from an industrial society to an information society, the number of projects in companies is increasing and at the same time their degree of complexity. This complexity of projects brings with it a number of problems. One of them is the number of stakeholders, which also increases as the size of the project increases. A stakeholder is a person or a group of people who are positively or negatively affected by the project or its product. In short, a person who has an interest in the project. Thus, as the number of stakeholders increases, so does the diversity of interests. When there is a diversity of interests, sooner or later conflicts will naturally arise. These conflicts can significantly jeopardise the success of the project.

Stakeholder analysis is a way to deal with this problem. It is typically divided into the steps of identification, classification and assessment and is carried out either as part of a project environment analysis or as part of stakeholder management.
Due to the importance of stakeholders and their incongruent interests with regard to the project, as described above, it is obvious that a stakeholder analysis is a critical success factor for projects. Based on the results of three studies from 2006-2008 by the German Association for Project Management (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Projektmanagement e.V., GPM). (GPM), this was examined for its truth content.

The thesis could not be easily proven. Although the results of the studies suggest a high importance of communication in the project and of stakeholder management, it cannot be concluded beyond doubt that stakeholder analysis is a critical success factor for projects. Nevertheless, it can at least be recognised that stakeholder analysis plays a weighty role for recognised critical success factors such as project communication or stakeholder management. Stakeholder analysis lays the foundation here.