ABSTRACT
Sadly, despite all this, we repeatedly read about projects that apparently ‘went wrong’; some failed to generate the stipulated benefits, others were never finished and petered out along the way, while still others were afterwards not seen as successful even though they were carried out as planned. A recurring theme in these failures is project managers who have not taken sufficiently into account the interests and motivations of the persons and entities that can affect or be affected by the project, the so-called project stakeholders. The consequences of this lack of attention are varied and significant: a software development project may not result in the stipulated benefits because the intended users of the product developed cannot or will not use it in the intended way; top management suddenly cuts the budget for a project because they have lost interest in it; the project course may be hindered by persons or entities that are against the project or its outcomes because of concerns about potential negative side effects. Such opponents could be competing project teams within the organization, non-government organizations (NGOs), political groups or unanticipated government regulators. Finally, the stipulated project benefits may have been ‘oversold’, and the project declared a fiasco in spite of delivering the project deliverables agreed upon.
