Project Organization Based on ISO 21500

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Project Organization based on ISO 21500. Project organization is covered in ISO 21500, the International Standard for Project Management. Today we are going to discuss the concept of ‘Stakeholders and Project Organization’ that provides us with the ISO 21500 Guide for Project Management. Please share your comments! :).

ISO 21500 states that Stakeholders and Project Organization “should be described in sufficient detail to enable project success. The roles and responsibilities of stakeholders should be defined and communicated based on the organization and project goals.”

From this definition, we can highlight the following facts:

Project organization described in sufficient detail

As it has been mention in previous articles, one of the main ISO 21500 contributions has been the addition of the new subject group Stakeholder Management. This way ISO 21500 has followed the approaches of IPMA ICB (IPMA Competence Baseline) version 3, BS6079 and Japan P2M, which have separated chapters/sections devoted to Stakeholder Management. Afterwords PMBOK added Stakeholder Management knowledge area to its latest revision (5th edition).

The key in Stakeholder Management is developing and executing a Stakeholder Management Plan. Inside this plan, each stakeholder must be described in sufficient detail to define specifics actions to manage him/her.

Project organization communicated

Of course, the Stakeholder Management Plan contains sensitive information that can’t be publicly distributed. But on the other hand, there is the Project Organization.

The Project Organization is the formal document that needs to be created and communicated to all the stakeholders in order for all to have a clear idea about the structure of the project, the roles involved and the responsibilities of all the people involved.

Project organization for meeting project goals

But finally the most important information that needs to be formally communicated to all the stakeholder is the Project Goals. Sometimes it is taken for granted that any stakeholder knows about the project, but that’s not the point, the point is if “project goals” have been clearly communicated at the beginning of the project.

Last but not least, some of them will probably be affected by some project decisions or they would take an active role in them. They need to understand the reasons that drives those decisions. Project Changes come and go, but the project doesn’t have to loose its goals upon which it was given the green light (those included in the Business Case).

Nobody knows how Honda is organized, except that it uses lots of project teams and is quite flexible. – Kenichi Ommae

What are your concerns about Stakeholders and Project Organization?