What makes someone a stakeholder, anyway? Let’s see … project sponsor; customer; investor, CEO, champion .. actually I think it really means anyone who has any stake in the project or the outcome, but for now let’s focus on the sponsor/champion persona.
I was reading a discussion string on LinkedIn the other day about what factors lead to project failure, and the poster and most of the commenters agreed that the #1 factor leading to a failed project is stakeholders. This surprised me, but I guess I’ve been lucky in that I’ve never managed a project where I’ve had to deal with this personally. But I do see it and hear about it, so I wanted to consider it more closely.
Stakeholders seem to all start out as an avid champion of the project, regardless of their title or vantage point, but over time they tend to fall into one of three categories: friend, foe, or neutral. The friend is the easiest to work with – they have a vested interest in a successful outcome, and really want to see you and the project succeed. The neutral parties were most likely excited and invested at the beginning of the project, but have lost interest or been distracted by other things over time. 
A foe is not someone who is against your project, but it might be someone who competes with you for resources or tries to allocate them to other projects. Anyone in project management or who performs project based work will have to deal with this conflict eventually. The trick is to do your best to anticipate the situation and communicate your resources needs … a preemptive strike, if you want to look at it as conflict resolution.
So, it all appears to come down to Stakeholder Management, which we’ll leave to another post (except for this cartoon, which just amused me). 
I will say that a flexible online project management tool with good reporting capabilities can go a long way to keeping stakeholders informed and so at bay. But I think the real trick is to avoid the pitfall of coming to see ALL your stakeholders as "The Enemy." It’s so easy to get into an us-against-them mindset, but this is completely counter-productive.
How do you see your stakeholders? What advice do you have to offer to other project managers to keep their stakeholders all planted solidly in the ‘Friends’ category so they can get on with the job of project management?
