Who are the real stakeholders? The Forty-Niners of gold-mining days? Modern-day Las Vegas gamblers? Or, as a well-intentioned overseas student of mine stated in broken English, are they “the guys who handle the beef?”
Stakeholders in the organizational-change management context, of course, are none of these things. Stakeholders are those who are positively or negatively affected by the activities or final results of a project. They stand to gain or to lose somehow. They have a claim or vested interest in the project. These include people working on the project, those who influence it, and others who will ultimately be affected by it.
What is Stakeholder Management and Why Bother With It?
Stakeholder management is a structured approach aimed at understanding the influence of project participants, onlookers and overseers, and subsequently planning the best way to influence each of these players. The key word is “structured,” as opposed to using a purely intuitive approach. Although project stakeholders have always been dealt with in some form, structured stakeholder management allows for comprehensive staging of what needs to be done to influence the project's doers and opinion makers.
Lack of a systematic slant at handling both the obvious movers and shakers and the behind-the-scenes stakeholders is an open invitation to disaster; sooner or later a disgruntled party will toss an unexpected curveball into the project arena. At a minimum, the fix for this curveball situation involves backtracking, rework and the management of grief.
Who Are the Stakeholders?
Folklore has it that NASA astronauts added the words “and bring him safely back to Earth” to the original purported Apollo Project objective set forth by President Kennedy: “Before the end of this decade, we will land a man on the moon…”
Certainly Neil Armstrong felt himself a major stakeholder in the Apollo Project. Some people carry higher stakes than others, just as the proverbial pig's role in ham and eggs is unquestionably greater than that of the chicken. Here are some stakeholders who carry different stakes.
Project Champions. The members of this group are largely responsible for the project's existence. They are often those who initiate the movement and are ultimately interested in seeing the project reach its operational stage. Examples of those who “champion the cause” are investors, project sponsors, upper management overseers, clients (external or internal), and politicians (local, state, federal).
Project Participants. This group performs the project work. The project team members' role is related to the project itself. They are usually not involved in the early conceptual phases and likely will not follow on to the operational phases. Some of these key players are project manager, team members, suppliers, contractors, specialists, and regulatory agencies.
External Stakeholders. These parties, while theoretically uninvolved, may suffer from “project fallout.” In other words, they may be affected by the project as it unfolds, or by the final results of the project once it has been implemented. They also may influence the course of the project. Examples of external stakeholders are environmentalists, community leaders, social groups, the media, and project team family members.
What Are the Steps to Successful Stakeholder Management?
While intuition is important when dealing with stakeholders, a step-by-step approach is recommended to ensure that all relevant issues are taken into account. Here is the suggested sequence of activities to ensure that stakeholders are properly dealt with:
1. Identify and gather preliminary information about stakeholders. Make a list of all who lay claim, in any form, to a share of the project's outcome. This includes, of course, the champions, the project participants and external stakeholders. Remember that stakeholders must be identified as individuals with names and faces, not just departments or groups. The information needed in this phase is names, background, mission, special circumstances, and past experiences.
2. Analyze stakeholders' probable behavior and potential impact. To what extent can stakeholders impact the project? And to what extent can their behavior be influenced? Here is a simple way for classifying the stakeholders:
a = stakeholders who can be influenced strongly
b = stakeholders who can be influenced moderately
c = stakeholders who can be influenced very little.
Stakeholders can also be classified by degree of impact on the project. For instance:
a = stakeholders who have a strong impact on the project
b = stakeholders who have a medium impact on the project
c = stakeholders who have a weak impact on the project.
3. Plan how each stakeholder should be dealt with. Planning how to deal with stakeholders can be simplified by asking yourself these questions: Who should interact with the stakeholder? What is the best timing? What is the stakeholder's stated objective or position regarding the project? What is the stakeholder's likely hidden agenda? What influences are exerted on the stakeholder? What approaches should be used? The answer to these questions provides the data needed to elaborate an approach for dealing with each stakeholder.
4. Implement and maintain strategy. This phase calls for carrying out specific activities: for example, ensuring that specific actions, responsible parties and dates are formally established; adjusting and reworking the implementation strategy as required; implementing the strategies in accordance with the relative importance of these stakeholders (i.e., major emphasis on small number of stakeholders that have a strong impact, normal efforts toward an intermediate group, and moderate attention toward stakeholders with a lesser impact).
Conclusion
Successful stakeholder management calls for a structured approach for dealing with the parties that have vested interests in a given project. This means that champions, participants and external stakeholders need to be managed using a step by step approach. Structured stakeholder management increases the probability for project success and decreases the chances for unwanted surprises. ■