Making the most of your stakeholders’ involvement
To maximize your stakeholders’ involvement and contributions, follow these guidelines throughout your project:
Involve stakeholders early in the project planning if they have a role later on. Give your stakeholders the option to participate in planning even if they don’t perform until later in the project. Sometimes they can share information that’ll make their tasks easier. At the least, they can reserve time to provide their services when you need them.
If you’re concerned with the legality of involving a specific stakeholder, check with your legal department or contracts office. Suppose you’re planning to award a competitive contract to buy certain equipment. You want to know whether prospective bidders typically have this equipment on hand and how long it’ll take to receive it after you award the contract. However, you’re concerned that speaking to potential contractors in the planning phase may tip them off about the procurement and lead to charges of favoritism by unsuccessful bidders who didn’t know about the procurement in advance.Instead of ignoring this important stakeholder, check with your contracts office or legal department to determine how you can get the information you want and still maintain the integrity of the bidding process.
Develop a plan with all key stakeholders to meet their information needs and interests as well as yours. Determine the information they want and the information you believe they need. Also decide when to provide that information and in what format. Finally, clarify what you want from them and how and when they can provide it.
Always be sure you understand each stakeholder’s “what’s in it for me” (WIIFM). Clarify why seeing your project succeed is in each stakeholder’s interest. Throughout your project, keep reminding your stakeholders of the benefits they’ll realize when your project’s complete and the progress your project has made toward achieving those benefits. Find out more about identifying project benefits for different stakeholders in Chapter 16.
Displaying Your Stakeholder Register
You’re concerned with two issues when developing the format and content of your stakeholder register:
Increasing your confidence that you identified all appropriate stakeholders
Helping others suggest people not on the register who should be included and people on the register who possibly should not
Figure 4-2 shows a sample stakeholder register format you may use for your stakeholder register. The format includes three major categories of information:
The hierarchical structure of the categories in which stakeholders are located
The specific identifiers of each stakeholder (job title and name)
The stakeholder’s role with regard to the project (driver, supporter, or observer; see the earlier section “Determining Whether Stakeholders Are Drivers, Supporters, or Observers”)
© John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
FIGURE 4-2: A sample stakeholder register format.
Confirming Your Stakeholders’ Authority
In project terms, authority refers to the overall right to make project decisions that others must follow, including the right to apply project resources, expend funds, or give approvals. Having opinions about how an aspect should be addressed is different from having the authority to decide how it will be addressed. Mistaking a person’s level of authority can lead to frustration as well as wasted time and money (see Chapter 12 for more on authority).
Take the following steps to define each stakeholder’s authority as early as possible in your projects:
1 Clarify each stakeholder’s tasks and decisions.Define with each person their tasks and their role in those tasks. For example, will they just work on the task, or will they also approve the schedules, resource expenditures, and work approaches?
2 Ask each stakeholder what their authority is regarding each decision and task.Ask about individual tasks rather than all issues in a particular area. For example, a person can be more confident about their authority to approve supply purchases up to $5,000 than about their authority to approve all equipment purchases, no matter the type or amount. Clarify decisions that the stakeholder can make. For decisions needing someone else’s approval, find out whose approval they need. (Ask — never assume!)
3 Ask each stakeholder how they know what authority they have.Does a written policy, procedure, or guideline confirm the authority? Did the person’s manager tell them in conversation? Is the person just assuming? If the person has no specific confirming information, encourage them to get it.
4 Check out each stakeholder’s history of exercising authority.Have you or other people worked with this person in the past? Have they been overruled on decisions that they said they were authorized to make? If so, ask them why they believe they won’t be similarly overruled this time.
5 Verify whether anything has recently changed regarding each stakeholder’s authority.Do you have any reason to believe that this person’s authority has changed? Are they new to their current group or position? Have they recently started working for a new manager? If any of these situations exists, encourage the person to find specific documentation to confirm their authority for their benefit as well as yours.
Assessing Your Stakeholders’ Power and Interest
A stakeholder’s potential impact on a project depends on the power they can exercise and the interest they have in exercising that power. Assessing the relative levels of each helps you decide with whom you should spend your time and effort to realize the greatest benefits.
Power is a person’s ability to influence the actions of others. This ability can derive either from the direct authority the person has to require people to respond to their requests (ascribed power; refer to the preceding section and to Chapter