# Managing stakeholders

Manage the people on the requesting side (stakeholders) as the project's contacts. This screen is split into two tabs: **People** and **Actors**.

![PM on Rails stakeholders. Names and roles of people you need answers from. Before: destinations lived in a personal address book. After: question recipients stay on the project.](https://pmonrails.com/docs-img/stakeholders.png)

## People (managing contacts)

## What you can do

- **Register them** — Set the name, its phonetic reading, the job title, the organisation, the email address, notes and tags.
- **Sort them with tags** — Group and filter by tags such as company, job title or area of responsibility (more flexible than adding fixed columns).
- **Phonetic reading** — Useful as a reading aid and for sorting.

## Inviting them as read-only

- A stakeholder can be **invited to the project as viewer (read-only by default)**. They can review what has been decided and append comments, test results, and bug reports linked to an acceptance scenario.
- A confirmation dialog appears before the invitation goes out (to prevent sending it by mistake).
- **Only owner / admin can invite** (the Invite as viewer button only appears for owner / admin).
- Contractors who will also do the work are invited from Members as editor or similar, not as viewer ([Members and permissions](https://pmonrails.com/en/docs/members.md)).

## How stakeholders relate to requirement cards

A requirement card can be linked to the stakeholders involved in it. Recording whose request it is feeds into the priority judgement (importance).

## Actors (the roles that use the system)

The Actors tab manages **the roles that use the system** (for example store staff / administrator / signed-out user). These are different from People, which are contacts: an actor is the character in the "as a [who]" part of a user story.

- **Extracted automatically, added manually** — Import meeting notes and the roles that appear in them are extracted automatically. You can also add them by hand from + Add new, and each actor shows where it came from: extracted from meeting notes, or manual.
- **Editable fields** — The actor name, the description (what that role does in the system) and aliases (to fold spelling variations together).
- **Carried into stories** — In the Actor field when you create a user story, the actor names you have registered are offered as suggestions (free text is also allowed).

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https://pmonrails.com/en/docs/stakeholders