ND8 DEVELOPMENT
Best Practice Software Development
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Thursday, July 23, 2009
Judging by the job adverts on the net, stakeholder management skills seem to be the “must have” requirement for the modern project and programme manager. Is this because the user community is becoming more demanding; no longer prepared to sit on the sidelines and wait for a solution that doesn’t meet their needs? Or is it because IS teams have realised that understanding the real needs of their customers, and obtaining their full support, is key to delivering a successful solution? Or perhaps it’s because scarce resources are increasingly fought over. Whatever the reason the more active involvement of the full customer community during the full delivery process of what is after all their solution, has got be a good thing, but it will require you to dust off all your skills in diplomacy, negotiation, influence and patience.
But what exactly is stakeholder management. How about:
“Acquiring and sustaining the senior management support required to ensure a project’s success”
One thing’s for sure, without consistent support, from initiation to completion, the inevitable ups and downs of project life will make life exceedingly difficult, and may well lead to project failure, or worse.
The first goal of stakeholder management is therefore to understand who’s a part of your stakeholder community. Likely candidates will be senior customers and IS managers, of influence, who’s area of interest will be directly impacted by the project, not forgetting those people on the periphery who hold an indirect interest, perhaps because the project is consuming precious resources they think could be better employed.
Your sponsor, who by definition is the champion of the project, should be the initial source of
information about stakeholders and it’s crucial that the project manager and sponsor have a close and trusting working relationship.
Two key words to pick out from the paragraphs above are “influence” and “trust”. Influence is not simply a matter of position in the organisation and it’s important to fully determine who has real influence, positive or negative, over proceedings. Trust is immensely important, initially with your sponsor and then with rest of the stakeholder community. If you can’t form a trusted relationship with your stakeholders you’re holed beneath the water line, but building trust is easier said than done. In my experience trust is gained through consistent action, openness and objectivity, rather than simply words, and often takes time, months rather than days, to truly establish.
Once you’ve identified your stakeholders, the next stage is to understand their attitude to the project and their level of influence. If all high influence stakeholders are broadly supportive of the project then you’re onto a winner. Conversely if all high influence stakeholders are unsupportive then I guess you need to wonder what you’re doing their in the first place. Whatever the position, you and your sponsor need to build up the necessary level of support and so need to determine which stakeholders need to be shifted from their neutral or unsupportive positions, create an action plan for each, and execute the plan until the balance is in the projects favour. It’s important to remember that not every stakeholder is important enough, or be willing, to shift, especially if they’ll be adversely affected by the project.
As the project moves on things will change. Stakeholders will arrive and depart, levels of influence will wax and wane, business and political contexts will shift. It’s important that
through-out all this activity, stakeholder management continues to maintain the necessary level of support right the way through to a successful delivery.
If all this sounds a bit political, then I’m afraid it is. Unfortunately project success is not simply a matter of executing a well defined plan that mechanically winds through to an inevitable conclusion. If that was the case it would be dead boring. Instead projects are instigated, run and influenced by people, and people, without fail, bring their own thoughts, experiences and aspirations, to the show leading to both high levels of conflict and more positively, high levels of creativity. Differences of experience and aspirations, no matter how well intended, equals politics, and any successful PM needs to understand this and have the tools to make the best of the situation.
The last word on this is that though the theory is simple enough, in practice managing the process can be extremely difficult, especially in highly charged political environments. Though I reckon I’ve an inkling about what I’m talking about here (or I wouldn’t be writing this) I’ve been caught out at least twice, especially when regimes change, and I fully expect to be caught out again. I think its part and parcel of trying to make things happen (which projects are all about).
Stakeholder Management