ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on stakeholder analysis, which is essential to target project success. In fact, stakeholder expectations are different, and they have to be harmonized via a decision process. Adherence of project requirements and constraints to stakeholder expectations must be verified and validated, and some important stakeholder expectations, and even some stakeholder role in the project, may be unclear and/or hidden, and have to emerge properly. Also, today more than 30% of projects do not meet their original goals and business intent; i.e., they do not satisfy stakeholder expectations. For each stakeholder community, the effective analysis that is proposed is based on a systemic approach, which focuses on cause-effect relationships: in all cases, relationships between strategies, which are the causes, and the expectations, which are the effects, are defined in the business and/or other plans that stakeholders set up, and they are affected by the internal and external environment, too. Therefore, it will be evident that project manager competences must include the management of not only operational issues, but also of strategic issues, which, furthermore, have to concern not just the domain of his own organization, but even customers, users, and other influencers domains.
