Staking a claim

Bob Newman of Insight Consulting (pictured below) has benchmarked data from over 1,000 in-depth stakeholder interviews across 250 organisations worldwide. Together with Donnie MacNicol at Team Animation, he highlights what is really important to stakeholders and what project management organisations should focus on if they want to strengthen their brand.

Never has it been more important to understand and strengthen the relationship between a project and its key stakeholders, including the project sponsors, SROs and the Board. Project managers, as owners of these key relationships, must therefore seek to develop their own skills and to understand what makes the difference in this world of subjectivity and complexity.

For the last 10 years, working mainly in IT and Telecomms, we have conducted reviews with project stakeholders for organisations whose main business is to manage and deliver projects, including billion pound business change programmes. We have carried out face to face reviews with over 1,000 key project stakeholders within over 250 organisations across a variety of market sectors. This exceptional knowledge base has been married with expertise in developing project management leadership, to offer insights to both stakeholders and project managers.

The stakeholder reviews are carried out through informal but structured interviews, covering a wide variety of aspects of project performance from a key stakeholder perspective including how the project is conducted, the competence, attitudes and behaviours of the project team and the reliability and predictability of delivery.

Each of these performance areas was discussed in-depth with the stakeholder, with a view to understanding their perceptions from a personal and professional perspective. The discussion also provides associated metrics related to stakeholder confidence.

Out of this work came six key recommendations for project managers:

1. Project success criteria An analysis of the data for business sponsors and client project managers indicates that both groups regard the delivery aspects as their top priority. This should be no surprise, but what is more significant is they also rated all the other performance areas as almost equally important. We believe that project sponsors and leaders should adopt this kind of broader model of project success criteria, to both challenge and support project managers in leading projects towards achieving success from a key stakeholder perspective.

2. Managing subjectivity Stakeholder perceptions are influenced by a range of factors. The one certainty is that stakeholders perspectives and priorities will change over time, and through successive project phases, and therefore it is dangerous to assume that yesterdays assumptions are still valid. Managing all this subjectivity and complexity is a significant activity that needs to be encouraged and supported by project sponsors and projects organisations. Projects need to be equipped to address it, in terms of resources, budget and new skills.

3. The differentiators of success For each performance area, there are aspects that normally make the positive difference from a stakeholder perspective. An analysis of the highest and lowest performing relationships in the performance area of Attitudes and Behaviours of the project team, identifies the positive factors that made the most difference in the highest performing relationships the Differentiators, and also the negative factors and criticisms that are mentioned most often in the lowest performing relationships, the Detractors. The most important Differentiators in this case are client focus and empathy, good project communications and being trusted and reliable.

4. Customer understanding is vital The analysis across all eight Performance Areas supports our personal conviction that the most significant overall Differentiator is the depth of understanding of the client shown by the project team, including business drivers and pressures, capabilities, culture and values, key people and power bases, politics and so on. This drives stakeholder confidence in benefit realisation, and in innovation and creativity, as well as overall confidence in project success. It also provides the foundation for project managers to identify opportunities for additional benefit realisation and value creation for leveraging the investment being made in the project.

5. Project managers need to be supported They need to be provided with the kind of broad and rich structured framework for evaluating stakeholder relationships and perspectives, and their confidence in project success, described above. Supporting project managers with the information from independent stakeholder reviews can also provide comparisons with global best practice plus an ongoing analysis of stakeholder expectations and priorities and of associated action/improvement opportunities. Project budgets should include an allowance for this.

6. Project management leadership is key Project managers need to develop as leaders in order to manage subjectivity and complexity. An effective relationship with stakeholders, underpinned by an understanding of stakeholder perspectives and priorities, is key to this. This is particularly important for project managers working in organisations whose products are their projects. The project manager will not be part of the clients organisation and will have little or no direct authority. Also, project managers may have to coach the sponsors and key stakeholders in how they can best support the project, e.g. by linking to a mutual understanding of the project vision.

Effective stakeholder relationships are also key to working out and implementing strategies for handling the inevitable resistance to change associated with the project. This reinforces our belief that the emphasis of investment in project management development should be changed to be more towards leadership skills.

In summary, key stakeholder perspectives, priorities, concerns and expectations depend on many things, which will frequently conflict and will change over time. All of this requires a new emphasis in project management, involving new skills, new information and new tools, and also some changes in the emphasis of associated investment.

• Bob Newman is director of Insight Consultancy and is a committed enthusiast in the area of improving stakeholder relationships. Donnie MacNicol is director of Team Animation, a consultancy specialising in developing project management leadership. He is chair of the People Specific Interest Group, member of the APM Policy Unit and member of Acumen7.