Throughout this blog and Kevin’s blog you will have seen
multiple references to stakeholders – they clearly are important in the field
of BRM. But what are they? Who are they? And why are they so important to this
process?
A good place to start would be with the definition of a
stakeholder that we can then build upon. According to Gerald Bradley in his
book ‘Benefit Realisation Management – A Practical Guide to Achieving Benefits
Through Change’, “a stakeholder is any individual, group or organisation who
will be affected by, or have influence over, the proposed investment.
Stakeholders should normally include customers and suppliers (internal or
external)”.
Now that we have got
a definition of what we think a stakeholder is, we still need to actually
identify them, a task that may be easier said than done. There can be immediately
obvious stakeholders such as the ‘project manager’ but there also may be people
who won’t be affected until the latter stages or indeed after the completion of
the programme or project. It is very important to identify all stakeholders at
very early stage and document their requirements, interests, involvement,
expectations, type of influence, power and possible impact, and communication
requirements. They may be internal stakeholders (internal to the organization) such as the
company management team, SRO, internal customer, project team,
program/project/portfolio manager, shareholders etc or external stakeholders (external to the
organisation) for example customer, users, suppliers, contractors, local
communities etc.
This blog is designed to give a quick and simple
introduction to what stakeholders are and why they can be important. For
further information on stakeholder analysis and management techniques, we
recommend further reading on the subject – some useful books are contained in the
Bibliography and Glossary link.
So now that we have a definition of what a stakeholder is,
for this learning project, just who are our stakeholders and why are they
stakeholders – why are they important and what influence do they have over the
success of the project?
Kevin – Director and CTO of BRM Fusion. As a director of the
company and CTO, Kevin would be an important stakeholder in this project– he
has a direct interest in the achievement of the outcomes and objectives in
terms of the value of the Realisor product and the standing of the BRM
Fusion/Realisor brands in the community. Additionally, Kevin has responsibility
for the Realisor tool development and can determine the direction of the help
functionality within the tool and can determine the content required for the
benefits management material and also provide valuable insights and offer
support and guidance on the content and can thus influence the ‘standard’ of
the material produced and the direction that the learning material can take.
Jenny – ‘Project Manager’ of this project - Jenny is both
affected by and can influence the project at various stages. Jenny is to
provide initially the specification for the course and the content within it.
Creating a blog will have an effect her profile and standing within the BRM
community but will also reflect upon the company. The content of the course
Davey and Wyn– Software Development and Support team. At this stage a member of the Realisor
development team may not seem like an obvious stakeholder in a project that is
focused around an approach to learning BRM, with Realisor just being used as an
example tool. However, when you refer back to the documentation, consideration
is being given as part of this project to providing help material for how to
use Realisor as a tool and a consideration of improved tooling integrated
within Realisor to support the process. Documenting how Realisor functions as a
tool may have an impact on some of the processes used by the development team –
e.g. an extra level of communication between the developers and learning
support team to ensure any changes to the tool are fully documented and
recorded. Additionally the consideration of added tooling within Realisor may
require additional skills/time or even developers to complete. When responding
to customer support requests, it is important that the members of the support
team possess the knowledge of the subject area and are familiar with the
learning content and the Realisor tool so they can provide the best level of customer
support.
Perhaps the most important stakeholder in this project is
one that we cannot pull into our workshop – the customer – the user of Realisor
and the help/support material. The objectives of the project include increasing
good practice, project professionalism and programme/portfolio success rates,
which mean that the customer learning experience is important in achieving
these objectives and realising the anticipated benefits. However, despite the
recognition of this, it can be very difficult to engage with and involve
customers, especially in the early stages, such as in a workshop. We can give
the customers the opportunity to comment and give feedback on the learning
material that has been produced, enabling comments and Q&A on the blog
So now that we have a working definition of stakeholder and
have identified our stakeholders why are they so important?
Chances are that your organisation/project/program is
undergoing a change or introducing a new ‘concept’ and you are looking to make
sure that expected benefits are realised from this. People need to be brought
on board for this to be successful – they need to be engaged, motivated and
involved in the process. As Bradley
points out, that common hindrances to success include a lack of commitment from
senior managers, lack of clear objectives and vision and stakeholders not being
brought into the change. For many people, change is not always welcome.
Sometimes the benefits of change may not be apparent to them, or they may have
difficulty fitting into the current way things are done. It should be noted that some of these stakeholders will have
minimum interest or influence on the project; however, project manager also has
to take care of them because no one knows when they will become the dominant
stakeholders.
What the stakeholders will want clearly communicated is ‘What’s
in it for me?’ and ‘What is against my interests?’ The Realisor Guide:
Questions for Business Analysts and Consultants available to download here provides further useful
questions that you may want to consider asking. Perhaps one of the most
constructive ways of asking and answering these questions would be in a workshop