Essential Skills for Project Stakeholders Identification: Sustainability Perspective

In every life cycle of the project there are numerous people or organizations involved either directly or indirectly. While these type of people and organizations involved are called stakeholders and these may include the project team, client or customer, community, environment, suppliers, government. Stakeholders contribute and share their experiences, knowledge, and insights to support the project throughout its life cycle and therefore it is crucial to capture their input. However, before initiation of the project, stakeholders need to be identified. Following the fact that there are strategies and processes for stakeholder identification, it is not clear what skills are needed to employ those strategies for stakeholder identification. These skills are exceedingly important to have because in today's corporate world, the project team must be flexible in every aspect of their job and be able to complement their skills for the success of stakeholder identification. Using literature review, this paper seeks to describe the skills of project leader needed to identify the project team and the external stakeholders. Inductive approach was followed in this study and data was collected qualitatively using secondary sources. There are two essential skills i.e. relationship building skills and communication skills for internal stakeholders and four major skills i.e. communication skills, people skills, intellectual skills and conceptual skills for external stakeholders are identified for the identification of project stakeholders through literature review considering the sustainability issues in the project management.