Project Management Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for project managers. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I'm developing an application that helps students to find the career that best fits their skill and personality.
This is the first time that I do a survey like this, so I'm confused about who are the stakeholders of this project ?
In my opinion, the students and their family are the internal stakeholders and directly use this application.
Universities, colleges and vocational schools are the external stakeholders.
Stakeholders are anyone who has a stake, role, share, etc. in the project. I am not sure the schools are stakeholders at all because based on the limited description of the application, you are targeting students, not schools. If you plan to partner with schools to help market or get proprietary university data, then they can become a stakeholder; however, if you are just targeting people who just happen to be students of a school, the school itself is largely irrelevant in the context of stakeholders.
As for internal vs. external, I am not sure this applies. In my experience, internal vs. external pertains to stakeholders within your company or team (internal) vs. outside your company or team (external).
Hope this helps and good luck with your app!
An approach to stakeholder analysis that has worked for me is to determine both who can impact the project positively or negatively during it's execution, and who can be impacted by the project's products once completed.
Once you have identified your stakeholders you can figure out to what degree you need to engage them before/during/after your project.
In addition to the ones that you have listed, off the top of my head you could also consider the following as potential stakeholders:
You are a stakeholder because you have a stake in the success of the survey.
Whoever is funding the development of the survey is a stakeholder.
Your students are stakeholders since they will participate and make decisions based on the outcome of the survey.
If you are working with others to create, distribute, or collect survey data they are stakeholders.
If the student's parents use directly make decisions off of the survey they are stakeholders.
Anyone else who uses the survey to make decisions (potential employers or those employers or industries wanting to be represented in the survey) are stakeholders.
Whoever's idea/decision/input has a weight on the outcome of the project, they are a stakeholder.
