2 management - School of International Business and ...

197 Project Management
The following rules apply for future decisions and control measures:
– High priority means: the dimension must be kept constant
– Medium priority means: the dimension must be optimized
– Low priority means the changes in the dimension can be accepted
2.1.1.4 PROJECT ENVIRONMENT
Every project is influenced by various environmental factors.
The following areas are found in a project environment:
Social project environment:
Figure 4 | A project's priority matrix
This includes people, groups and organizations in the project environment. These are also called
'stakeholders' in project management.
Tangible project environment:
This includes the technical-objective influences on the project, for example, changes to market
relationships or technical progress and their influence on project results.
Additional differentiation can be achieved by:
Direct project environment:
This can include all environmental factors which are in direct connection to the project organiza-
tion or project goals. Key to this are the project-granting companies, as well as clients, customers
or suppliers.
Indirect project environment:
This includes all factors which are only indirectly tied to the project, for example : authorities,
politicians, citizens or interest groups. They can work through political or legal channels, thus
indirectly influencing the objectives and measures.
A systematic comparison of these four environmental factors with typical examples is shown in Fig. 5.
Because social environmental factors (also called 'stakeholders') are investigated further in the