A stakeholder is anyone who is likely to be impacted by a project. Broadly, stakeholders can be classified into "Internal Stakeholders" and "External Stakeholders".

Internal stakeholders are within the organization which include Project sponsor, Project owner, Project team, any person or team who gives inputs for the project or is benefitted by the outcome of the project. External stakeholders are outside the organization and they can be vendors, customers, shareholders, Government, auditors, etc.

Stakeholders play an active role in project execution so they need to receive the right information at the right time. This may seem intuitive, but properly communicating essential aspects of a project with key stakeholders before and during execution often falls through the cracks.

Project Stakeholder involves the identification of stakeholders, analysis of their influences, and expectations. Stakeholders can influence project outcomes based on their power. Hence, you need to develop appropriate strategies to work with the stakeholders and execute the project. The right level of communication is required for each stakeholder.

Communication with Stakeholders is important since it is the lifeline of effective project relationships. This needs to involve establishing a sound relationship and understanding how their work is contributing to project success. You need to establish trust and maintain relevance. Important stakeholders can provide constraints or requirements based on information from their industry. This will help you understand the project risks and constraints. The more you communicate with stakeholders, the more you will uncover and reduce risks on your project.

Communicating with Stakeholders can help us in achieving following goals:

• Providing Expertise:

  Some stakeholders are wealth of knowledge, they can be very useful in providing best advices regarding project. This could be on current processes, industry insight, or historical knowledge. Project managers may not be experts. Hence it is critical to have people who can provide expert advice

• Ensure Project Success:

By involving stakeholders in project it'll help increase the probability of project success. These could be due to conflicting needs or priorities. Here is the chance to set expectations early in the project life cycle. By continuously being in contact with project stakeholders and following their right advices project success is garenteed.

• Reducing Risks:

The more the stakeholders are involved in project the lesser risks you will have. During discussions on project requirements or constraints, they may come up with issues or concerns about meeting certain targets or needs. Uncovering such risks and discussing a strategy to mitigate them will dramatically increase the success of your project

• Getting Project acceptance:

A project manager should regularly engage and involve stakeholders from the start. This will ensure them to have a positive project conclusion. With this, the team members would have already known the delivery expectations, risks, and how to mitigate the risks. The final acceptance will be smooth during the project closure phase.

So communication with stakeholders at every phase of the project is essential because it plays important role in project completion.