Manage Stakeholders Lest Thy Project Fail

Stakeholders isn’t a fancy-pants MBA-word. It means ‘everyone who is impacted.’

If we really stretch it, your competitors could be stakeholders -- if you bring in more business and are more successful, they might benchmark against you and try to copy your process.

Kevin Archbold is a project manager’s project manager. He’s been in the field 25 years, ranging from practicing and consulting on projects in nuclear, astronomy, mining, local government, federal government, IT, startups, trucking, and lots more.

He’s patient, informative, and smiles in equanimity when talking about the vagaries and failures most people and organizations face.

When asked why people complain that taking time to plan takes too long, he answers with a mix of stoicism and kindness:

“The reality is, filling in a 2-page document doesn’t take much time to type. If it takes time, it means you’re needing to think through and ask questions to different people. If it’s taking time, it means you’re getting conflicting information or have missing information. That’s the point, that’s why you write a project charter.”

The most common point of failure?

Not getting everyone on the same page.

Archbold: “A good best practice definition of stakeholder is anyone who is involved, impacted, or perceives themselves as being impacted by a project. This can be a pretty long list of stakeholders for most projects: sometimes they can be grouped together as a group of stakeholders, but you should list them all out and think about what their needs are. The piece most people miss is who is impacted.”

Archbold advises that you don’t necessarily need to communicate with every single person who is impacted, but you should at least think through their needs and make that decision intelligently.

Most people miss a lot of key stakeholders — other people at the company, in the community, current customers or clients… and sometimes people you don’t even know yet, like future customers who have never even contacted the firm yet.

Every one of these people needs to be taken into consideration in a proactive plan that understands their needs. If you already understand their needs, it doesn’t take long to fill this out at all.

Archbold continues, “If we really stretch it, your competitors could be stakeholders — if you bring in more business and are more successful, they might benchmark against you and try to copy your process.

These are all things that could influence how you think about the process very early on. Imagine you got halfway through the project and realize your competitors could just easily copy what you did and you’d have no advantage. Or imagine your investors would get worried about the cost of you switching, and if you’d talked to them upfront they would be less worried. Maybe key customers are getting unsettled.

The point is, we want to get all these potential stakeholders on the table upfront and have an intelligent conversation about them (and possibly with them).”

You can get free resources including his “project management charter” on Kevin Archbold’s “Key Consulting” site. Kevin is currently offering a charity deal through GiveGetWin, where you can get walked through an entire entire initial project planning session for $19.95, with 100% of the proceeds to charity. This is a far reduction from his usual rates — click here to learn more and get your most important project off to the right start.