Recycled Bullsh-IT

What do you think the main cause of project failure is? The normal answer is “Not me; it was someone else…” Funnily enough, if you ask all participants you get the same answer. The real answer in most cases is poor communication and engagement.

 One of the main culprits for this non-communication issue is what is laughingly called the ‘Stakeholder’, or the senior executives who are sponsoring the project. In most projects you will be told that there are a number of stakeholders who need to be involved and satisfied with the outcome of the project. What they don’t tell you is that these stakeholders don’t see this as a quid pro quo but more as one-way traffic, with you giving and them taking.

 I’m not being (too) critical of stakeholders here, more of the process of ‘Stakeholder Management’. Any project manager worth their salarium (see How to Pick a Perfect PM) will have been taught the need to manage their stakeholders. However, the interesting part – HOW to manage your stakeholders – is rarely covered successfully. In theory, all you have to do is to talk to the stakeholder, explain why they have to compromise their requirements (time/cost/quality) and (now digitally) shake their hands to agree. But when this particular stakeholder is the Managing Director, or Senior Sales VP, it never seems to work out like this. You find yourself getting hot under the collar, and the words have trouble leaving your mouth in the intense glare you are under. If you manage to squeak out your points, you find that the stakeholder is both deaf and blind to your entreaties (or will deafen and blind you in a fit of pique).

 You have to understand a few simple truths here. If the person you are speaking to will gain personally from the project succeeding, you are likely to get their support. If the stakeholder will not gain in any way, even if the impact is neutral, they will do what they can to make it fail. This seemingly irrational behaviour is all about politics. At senior levels it is not good enough for an executive merely to win; his colleague/competition must be seen to fail.

 If you are not careful your painstakingly derived requirements will start to resemble a suicide note as each change that is demanded digs your hole deeper and deeper.

 To succeed in managing more than one stakeholder on a project requires some animal guile and fertile imagination. You need to cunningly position each stakeholder separately (and fully understand what success looks like to them). You will also need to come up with an ingenious set of wins for each stakeholder that makes them feel that only they were left standing after Fight Club, but which will not leave you with an incompatible and unachievable set of overall deliverables. I have found that there are usually some common benefits that can be promoted, along with specific low value/cost benefits that can be delivered by the programme without affecting the risks or costs too much – ‘pork barrelling’ by another name.

 So, put on your cowboy boots and your Stetson. Have your whip handy and get cracking!

Congressman John ‘Pork Belly’ Moe