MBA Project: Scope, Stakeholder Management & Risk Mitigation Analysis

This project assignment provides a comprehensive analysis of project scope, stakeholder management, and risk mitigation strategies. It begins by defining project scope, its aims, and objectives, emphasizing the importance of planning, control, and closure. The assignment then delves into stakeholder analysis, outlining the process of identifying stakeholders, assessing their significance and influence, and defining their participation. Key aspects of stakeholder management, including communication, expectation management, and relationship building, are discussed, along with the major inputs and tools for creating an effective stakeholder management plan. Finally, the assignment addresses risk analysis and mitigation strategies, highlighting the importance of acknowledging risks, developing plans to avert repercussions, and maintaining stakeholder awareness. The document is contributed by a student and available on Desklib, a platform offering solved assignments and study resources for students.

Definition of Project Scope
• Project scope is defined as a comprehensive set of deliverables in a project.
• These deliverables are derived from the project’s requirements (Sanghera, 2018,
p.136). Additionally, PMBOK, terms project scope as “the work required to be
completed to deliver a service, product of result in accordance to the specified
functionalities and features” (PMI. 2013).
• Therefore, project scope is part of project planning that consists of documenting,
and determining a list of project specifications like goals, costs, deliverables, tasks
and deadlines.
• Project scope entails several process such as planning, control and closure.

• Planning: It is the attempt made to apprehend as well as describe the work has to
be carried out in the project (Shirazi, Kazemipoor, and Tavakkoli-Moghaddam,
2017, p.397).
• Control: It is the process of monitoring the project which solely focus on
documenting tracking, scope creep, approving and disapproving project changes,
and tracking.
• Closure: It is the final stage of the project. Closing involves auditing of the
project’s deliverables and evaluating results attained by the project alongside the
original plan.

Aims of Project Scope
• The aim of scope in project management is to make sure the delivery of a project
product on the due date, within set budget and it has to satisfy the needs and want
of the customer.

Objectives of Project Scope
• The project scope statement works to attain a range of objectives. Some of these objectives
include:
• To help the project manager and the project team to maintain and remain focussed on project
tasks.
• To determine the guiding principles that should be followed by the project team in decision-
making and how to respond to change requests during the project course.
• To provide a roadmap to project managers on how to allocate tasks, budget and work
schedule.

Analysis of Stakeholders Group
• First of all project stakeholders are individuals or organisations who actively take part in
activities of a project and whose interest can be influenced by the execution of the project
or project accomplishment.
• Stakeholders are essential to the success of any given project since their participation as
well as support are core to its achievement. Stakeholders plays a critical part to the success
or failure of a project.
• Thus, identifying stakeholders is a key practise in project management to ensure
successful projects.

• Binder, (2016) defines stakeholder analysis a broad range of tools and techniques
used for identifying as well as understanding the wants and expectations of core
interests both internal and external the project setting.
• Through understanding the project attributes, interfaces, interrelationships
amongst project advocates and opponents helps project managers to strategically
plan projects.

Approach used to Analyse Stakeholders
• Stakeholder analysis is done before the commencing of a project.
• Analysis entails sensitive information which project facilitators should be
conversant reading the probability to uncover hidden agendas, and unproductive
interests at the time of discussing with stakeholders.

Steps to Complete Stakeholder Analysis
• Identifying project stakeholders: For an individual or a group of individuals to be
categorised as a stakeholder they need to show some interest or influence which is likely to
impact the project.
• Brainstorming is the initial activity that is applied on the selected members regarding the
project (Kerzner, 2017.
• To have a better understanding of the expectations and needs of the project stakeholders are
identified by their name instead of using generic terms like sponsor, customer and owner.

• Identifying interests of stakeholders, level of impact and relative priority: To
improve on the earlier phase, stakeholders are listed in a spreadsheet of in table
alongside their main interests, priority as well as probable impact level to the
project.
• The process allows the project manager to be in position to outline several
interests, especially those are avoided and hidden in relationship to objectives of a
project (Cooper et al., 2014).
• It is important to understand that interest identification is conducted with the
perspective of the stakeholder in mind and not the project manager.

• This stage is quite hard because interest are normally hidden and antagonistic to sated project objectives.
• Thus, every interest has to relate to a suitable project stage.
• Therefore, interest keep changing with the movement of the project from the start to the ending phase.
• Certainly, to some stakeholders it can be necessary to extract interests by formally asking questions like:
i. What are your hopes for this project?
ii. Are there any shareholders who may be having conflicting interests with yours?
iii. In what ways does the successful completion of the project benefit you?
iv. Which stakeholders’ interests do you believe they are conflict8ng with your interests?

• Once the key interests are recognised the project manager outlines the way in which the
project shall have to be compressed if they are not met.
• Assessing stakeholders for significance and influence: In order to understand the
understanding level of stakeholders regarding the influence and importance to the project.
• Thus, to understand this, a formal evaluation of every stakeholder’s level of influence to
the project.
• Influence shows the stakeholder’s comparative power in and within a project.
• Stakeholders with great influence help to manage major decisions within the project as
they have strong capability to contribute to the project implementation of tasks among
other actions.

• Importance shows the extent to which the project cannot be measured as a
successful in cases expectations, needs and issues are not ironed out.
• This measure comes as a result of the stakeholder’s relationship requirements to
the goals as well as purposes of the project.
• The combination of these two aspects influence and importance give the project
manager an insight to the manner in which stakeholders communicate as well as
aid in detecting additional risk and assumptions in a project.

Stakeholder Participation Matrix

• Listing risks and assumptions: The success of a project is based on the validity of key
risks and assumptions.
• In accordance to stakeholders, risks arise when there are conflicting requirements and
expectations.
• For instance, influence of a stakeholder with high influence could not align with the
project’s objective hence blocking a project’s positive development.
• To light up such major risks project manager are required to make clarifications regarding
unspecified roles of stakeholder as well their responsibilities that they are to play.
• A spreadsheet or table can be utilised to capture such information.

• Defining participation of stakeholder: After evaluating stakeholders there is
need to assess their level of participation as well their information requirements.
• A well-organised project is supposed to clarify its stakeholders primary roles by
defining in detail the individual to participate and when.
• All stakeholders cannot take part in all features of the project’s lifecycle stages.

Stakeholders Issues and Management
Strategies
• Stakeholder planning entails devising strategies to effectively involve major
stakeholders all the progress of a project life cycle.
• The major activities here are:
• Managing and enhancing communications.
• Identifying the expectations of stakeholders to know how to manage
• Creating and maintaining active relationships between project teams, project
manager and stakeholders.
• Reviewing and if necessary making adjustments to the level of stakeholder
involvement in the progress of a project.
• The management of stakeholder has to be iterative and continuous.

Major Inputs for Stakeholder Management Plan
• The most appropriate information for developing the stakeholder management
plan consists of the following:
• Human resource requirements: It outlines the way in which responsibilities,
roles, staffing management and reporting has to be carried out.
• Communication techniques amongst stakeholders
• The procedures to be followed at every project phase
• The manner in which project task are supposed to be undertaken to realise the
project’s objectives.
• Change management plan.

• Stakeholder register: The register provide an output of the previous processes
and also identify the stakeholders that are potentially significant to the project
success.
• Enterprise environmental factors: Indeed, all factors that are defined in the
PMBOK Guide are comparatively significant to planning of stakeholder.
• Organisation process assets: All organisational process assets play a significant
part in stakeholder planning, nonetheless, lessons learned as well as previous
information from similar projects are quite relevant.

Key Tools for stakeholder Management
• Expert judgment: Expert judgement aid in determining the extent to which stakeholders’
involvement is required for the successful completion of every project phase.
• For example engagement of top executive stakeholders like project sponsors can be of
great significance at the initial stage of the project.
• Meetings: Meetings are used to give chance for a forum to the project teams as well as
other experts to discuss the needed stakeholder involvement levels to achieve success of
a project.

• Analytical techniques: It gives chance to project managers to make a comparison
between the planned involvement levels to the real-time actual engagements levels with
the help of the following classification criteria through which stakeholders could be:
• Unaware. Stakeholders could be unaware of the project but have potential impact on
the project.
• Supportive. These are stakeholders who are conversant with the project and have
potential influence and are supportive of change to the project.
• Resistant. These are stakeholders who are aware of the project and have potential
influence however, they are resistant to change.

• Neutral. These are stakeholders who are aware of the project but they do not resists or
support it.
• Leading. These are stakeholders who are aware of the project, have the potential to influence
the project and proactively take part in making sure the project becomes successful.
• Outputs for Stakeholder Management Plan.
• It comprises two output plans.
• Stakeholder management plan. It is used to identify the management strategies needed for effective
involvement of stakeholders in the project.
• The plan can document certain specifications like:
i. Preferred involvement level
ii. Stakeholder interrelations as well as possible overlaps

i. Frequencies and time frame for conveying necessary information
ii. Stakeholder communication requirements
iii. Approaches for improving/updating the stakeholder management plan
• Project documents updates: It includes stakeholder register and project schedule

Table 1: Summary of Stakeholder Management Plan
Stakeholder Management Plan
Inputs Tools Outputs
1. Project management plan
2. Stakeholder register
3. Enterprise Environmental
factors
4. Organizational process assets
Meetings
Expert judgement
Analytical techniques
Stakeholder management
plan
Project document updates

Analysis of Risk Involved in Project
Management
• Project risk analysis and management is the procedure utilised to enable the
analysis as well as management of the risk related with a project.
• When this process is conducted in a well-organised way it increases the possibility
of successful accomplishing of the project in accordance to time, cost and
performance objectives (Carvalho, and Rabechini Junior, 2015, p.321).
• Project risk analysis and management work to see to it that risks that threaten the
success of the project are reduced or removed.

Risk Mitigation Strategies
• Risk mitigation is a process that involve compiling of actionable steps that could aid to
maximise the project’s potential and minimise the threat to goals of the project.
• Therefore, to mitigate risks in project management include:
• Acknowledging and accepting the risk: The entire cycle commences when the project
manager work closely with the stakeholders in the different task levels to asses different
risks involved at dissimilar phases of project progression (Kendrick, 2015).
• These risks can be separated according to whether they are likely to influence traditional
factors such as timeline, finances, as well as the delivery quality or not.

• When the project teams come to an expansive understanding with the risks, the team can then
assemble to evaluate whether or not it is worthwhile to conduct the project with consequences
being as they are.
• Thus, it is significant to keep the stakeholders informed as much as possible to be able to
understand extensive impacts of the risks before things fall out of control.
• Develop a plan that avert repercussions: when all the stakeholders are notified about the
project risks and have been evaluated the repercussions, the project manager can mainly
evaluate whether or not the project in progress in question is feasible enough (Hopkin, 2018).
• When the project manager gets a nod they are able to come up with policies and procedural
measures to proactively avert possible risks.

• Inclusion transference strategies: At this stage risks are typically arbitrated as well as
directed to another conduit.
• Although, transference cannot be a possibility in all cases, it is significant when different
parties are included to take the plausible risk to the project.
• Control the impact of the risk: When in control actions which minimise the entire severity
of the risk is mostly evaluated and work on.
• Control takes into consideration the severity of the possible risks in addition to the
occurrence.
• Monitor the execution: Monitoring and keeping a record of the project’s progress plays a
significant role to draw tangible guidelines for upcoming projects to draw from.

Project Budget Template
• Project budget help project managers
to stay on budget throughout the whole
project as it enables them to tackle
fixed costs, materials, among other
things.
• The budget template aid project
managers to stay diligent in their
spending as well as other project teams
to know if they are under or over
spending.

Key Performance Indicators Used to Monitor Project
Performance
• Key performance indicators (KPIs) comprises particular measurement tools for
indicating the how well project teams performance are realizing specific project goals
(Yin, Zhu, and Kaynak, 2015, p.1654).
• The primary performance indicators used for monitoring project performance include:
1. Project schedule
2. Client satisfaction
3. Present cost of performance
4. Current resource allocation
5. Labour costs spent
6. Current development backlog

References
Binder, J., 2016. Global project management: communication, collaboration and management
across borders. Routledge.
Carvalho, M.M.D. and Rabechini Junior, R., 2015. Impact of risk management on project
performance: the importance of soft skills. International Journal of Production Research, 53(2),
pp.321-340.
Cooper, D., Bosnich, P., Grey, S., Purdy, G., Raymond, G., Walker, P. and Wood, M., 2014. Project
Risk Management Guidelines: Managing Risk with ISO 31000 and IEC 62198. Wiley Global
Education.
Hopkin, P., 2018. Fundamentals of risk management: understanding, evaluating and implementing
effective risk management. Kogan Page Publishers.
Kendrick, T., 2015. Identifying and managing project risk: essential tools for failure-proofing your
project. Amacom.
Kerzner, H., 2017. Project management metrics, KPIs, and dashboards: a guide to measuring and
monitoring project performance. John Wiley & Sons.

Marcelino-Sádaba, S., González-Jaen, L.F. and Pérez-Ezcurdia, A., 2015. Using project
management as a way to sustainability. From a comprehensive review to a framework
definition. Journal of cleaner production, 99, pp.1-16.
Martens, M.L. and Carvalho, M.M., 2017. Key factors of sustainability in project management
context: A survey exploring the project managers' perspective. International Journal of Project
Management, 35(6), pp.1084-1102.
PMI. (2013). A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge: PMOK Guide (5th ed.).
Newton Square, PA: Project Management Institute, Inc.
Sanghera, P., 2018. Project Scope Management. In CAPM® in Depth (pp. 135-171). Apress,
Berkeley, CA.
Shirazi, F., Kazemipoor, H. and Tavakkoli-Moghaddam, R., 2017. Fuzzy decision analysis for
project scope change management. Decision Science Letters, 6(4), pp.395-406.
Yin, S., Zhu, X. and Kaynak, O., 2015. Improved PLS focused on key-performance-indicator-
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