ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the critical success factor of satisfying stakeholder requirements and expectations. In fact, although the attention to stakeholders increased significantly in last years, the dichotomy between requirements and expectations led, and still leads, to harmful misunderstandings, and, furthermore, it is a basic cause for projects' lacks of success and/or failures; stakeholder perspective then became a definite driver for project success, and, even if it includes the subjectivity of relations, it is more reliable, and controllable, than traditional stand-alone project requirements perspective, which, in any case, is objective only apparently, since requirements are a mediation of different subjective stakeholder expectations. In stakeholder perspective, starting from the invested value in terms of resources, stakeholder relations both generate a value in terms of deliverables, and determine a perceived value in terms of satisfaction; therefore, effective stakeholder management should target both the fulfillment of project/stakeholder requirements and the satisfaction of stakeholder expectations, which correspond to both the achievement of project objectives and the perception that project goals will be achieved. Ultimately, stakeholder satisfaction, instead of being “a” critical success factor, proves then to be “the” critical success factor in all projects.
