Delivering Stakeholder Management

It’s relatively easy to identify most stakeholders. Once they have been identified it’s relatively easy to put together a communication plan which allows you to tell them what they need to know. The plan can include two way communication events such as requirements analysis, Q&A events, document reviews and user tests. These are all part of the tried and tested approach to stakeholder management.

Rather more difficult is the management of stakeholder expectations. The project manager can issue crystal clear bulletins about what has been agreed and what is actually happening. At some point these butt up against stakeholder assumptions, recollections and aspirations. The bits which match will bolster the stakeholder’s world view. The bits which don’t match may provoke a reaction. If they do, that’s all to the good as it allows the project manager to identify and deal with any mismatch between the project as agreed and stakeholder expectations. But not all readers will bother to react. The danger comes when stakeholders skim project communications for the bits which confirm their expectations and ignore the rest. Then expectations may begin to diverge substantially from the project aims. Once that happens to any extent the project will never be a success. It may deliver to scope, cost and timescale but it won’t be viewed as successful because it’s not delivering what stakeholders have come to expect.

For a project manager to become a good stakeholder manager, it’s necessary to look beyond the project’s formal structured communication, and apply the black arts of expectation analysis and expectation management. Catch a straying expectation before it’s far from the straight and narrow and it’s easy to nudge it back on course. Let it stray long enough to become feral and you may not catch it in the lifetime of the project.

Becoming a curator of expectations requires a diverse set of skills, but the core skill is networking. Informal chats can alert the project manager to straying expections much more quickly than any formal discussion. It’s not just the obvious stakeholders who can be useful sources of information. Other projects and BAU targets may hide a reliance on invalid expectations, and people may set such targets as a means of pressurising a project to change its remit.

Sometimes divergent expectations arise because the business has moved on from the original project requirements, and the project may need to change in order to deliver business benefits.

It may not be easy to decide whether expectations should be brought in line or the project changed to meet expectations. This is where stakeholder management feeds into risk and issue management, and through that to the broader project governance and sponsorship if it appears that problems are going beyond the authority delegated to the project manager.

You can, in isolation, deliver a project which meets all its objectives. But unless you step outside the ivory tower and keep abreast of events in the wider context the project may not be seen to be successful. That’s why a project manager needs a taste for coffee, beer and cocktails, not to mention a tolerance for the smoky, windy conditions endured by the huddles which gather outside the doors of most office buildings.

You don’t have to be paranoid……

The DeliveryDemon was looking at security settings on the laptop recently after the moderate paranoia setting started blocking WordPress cookies. To check what was happening she used the ‘prompt’ setting, requiring manual approval of cookies. Cue a very tired hand, and the site concerned was a perfectly respectable one! A big disconnect appears to have grown between website development practice and security practice. It appears that we are offered two choice

•  blind reliance on automated cookie approval / rejection
• total unusability.

This little experiment has the DeliveryDemon asking a LOT of questions:

• What are these cookies doing?
• How much of my storage / processing power are they hogging?
• What’s going on when a ‘respectable’ website (not WordPress) wants to install 20 or more cookies per screen?
• Why don’t website designers realise that a cookie plague makes the most honourable of organisations look dubious?
• Whatever happened to respecting the right of the user to choose an appropriate security setting?

The DeliveryDemon appreciates that there’s a balance to be struck when it comes to website stats and marketing requirements. But if the designers come up with something better than forcing the user to change security settings for all sites to fit the requirements of one particular site, there’s something wrong.

If the medium paranoia setting stops a website from working, then someone has delivered a very poor level of security.

Expectations and Single Point Estimating

Bob Barnes and Fred Baker have an interesting blog post entitled Project Life Cycle is Essential in Managing Risk. Their blog is at http://www.pmprofessors.com/ This is an interesting example of stakeholder expectations, and here’s the DeliveryDemon’s take on it.

Common understanding of an estimate is that it is a single point value. As project managers we know that there is an uncertainty range associated with any estimate, which narrows as more knowledge becomes available through the life of a project. Business processes tend to force us to provide a single point estimate, and expectations are adopted on the basis of that value. It’s an ongoing piece of work for a project manager to keep stakeholders in touch with the reality of what is happening, and that is no guarantee that a stakeholder won’t suddenly revert to the original expectation.

This is a reflection of the current level of maturity in non-PM understanding of project management processes. It won’t go away until PM becomes a core business competency, at the level exercised by today’s above average PMs, and we are still some way away from that.

Today’s PM needs to be aware of the issue and factor it into stakeholder expectation management.

Expectation Management

Any well trained project manager knows that surprises are bad news. Underperform, and it’s your fault. Overperform and people want to know why you didn’t make a more challenging commitment in the first place. Such is the lot of the project manager!

Every project is surrounded and permeated by expectations. The team has them, so does the project sponsor, and all the suppliers, not to mention customers, and the operations team. All those expectations are coloured by the recollections and assumptions and experience of the individual stakeholder. Ask a stakeholder what their expectations are and you will get a response but that won’t be the whole story. Often expectations aren’t identified until they are not met, and the stakeholder sees it as a project failure. As project managers, we talk glibly about expectation management, but it’s a complex and delicate subject. A project manager needs to analyse the project environment and decide how much effort needs to go into expectation management. It’s not a one-off exercise either. This decision needs to be reviewed at each stage and major change and decision point, and at any time their are indications of loss of confidence in the project, or excessive expectations. And of course the communication plan needs to be updated to deal with the reality rather than the situation which the project manager *expected* to exist!

Thinking about expectation management in general, DeliveryDemon did an analysis of her own expectations during a recent trip to Edinburgh for a Saturday meeting, and was surprised at the extent of the assumptions made during the trip and how they affected her.

Lift to the airport DeliveryDemon assumed the driver would head for the motorway, the driver preferred the direct route through towns. There probably isn’t a lot to choose between the routes but at each red traffic light and school crossing the DeliveryDemon got twitchier and twitchier.

Before check-in the DeliveryDemon was hungry and popped into M&S for a sandwich and bottle of water, an obvious thing to do in an airport mall full of food shops. Full marks (sorry, pun!!) to the checkout girl who recognised the assumption of eating the food on the plane, and provided a gentle reminder that drinks can’t be taken through security.

Airside is really designed to take expectations, shake them up and leave the traveller feeling jumpy. On the one hand shops and restaurants encourage browsing and relaxing over a meal or a drink. On the other hand the departure boards demand attention. When the distant gate is finally announced, the delivery-oriented DeliveryDemon wants to head straight for the gate, and is frustrated by the shuffling, 6-wide groups who expect that others will match speed to that necessitated by their in-depth discussion of last night’s soap or football match. Then once the gate is open, airline staff rush the passengers through and chivvy them along  – to wait in a queue. Rush, stop, rush, stop – the metabolism doesn’t know what to expect. What a recipe for high blood pressure and heart attacks!

In the sky the DeliveryDemon tends to expect interesting clouds and clear, photogenic, views, and feels vaguely cheated by a flight through grey cottonwool.

Meeting people provides a good test of assumptions. The DeliveryDemon and colleague got the mobiles out to make contact with another colleague arriving on a different flight, arranging to meet at the luggage carousel in arrivals. After some confusion the invalid expectation became clear – the colleague had arrived on a European flight, coming through a different arrivals area.

The hotel was one of two in a larger chain, situated in the Grassmarket. Expecting to stay in the same hotel as other colleagues, several people were annoyed to lose out on the opportunities of discussion over breakfast or a late night drink as overbooking meant the party was split between two hotels. For the unlucky group diverted down the road, the hotel failed to meet expectations of cleanliness with rooms where evidence of previous occupants had not been removed, and failed to meet expectations of construction standards with double glazing so ineffective that it would have been as quiet sleeping out in the Grassmarket during the Friday night festivities.

Finding a restaurant also upset a few expectations. Nose to the steamed up glass, DeliveryDemon waved to colleagues crammed round some window tables in the recommended eatery. There was no way that three of us would be able to battle through the crowds to the tables, never mind find seating space. But we did. And the staff conjured up chairs and created elbow room from a fifth dimension. The DeliveryDemon was very glad of being persuaded to ignore her expectations of not getting a seat, more so when faced with a steak served up on a hot stone with a pile of jacket wedges!

Grey days Having lived in Edinburgh, the DeliveryDemon expected and was prepared for grey skies and sharp winds, seasoned with the odd rain shower. Fortunately the DeliveryDemon also favours contingency planning, and adapted her expectations when faced with warm sunshine and clear blue skies, sneaking out between sessions for some impromptu architectural photography.

 

Castle from Grassmarket

The Hub

The Hub

Boswell’s Court

Castle silhouette

Detail of Statue near St Giles

Royal Mile

St Giles

 Lunch hadn’t been a high spot at previous meetings, but the DeliveryDemon’s expectations were overset by a tasty cooked lunch which was light enough to avoid doziness during the afternoon session. Of course, with the Edinburgh hotel showing what can be done, expectations have been reset for lunches at future London meetings.

The return flight DeliveryDemon had hoped for a return flight to Luton, much closer to home than Heathrow but the expected evening return didn’t exist. DeliveryDemon is unimpressed with the UK’s domestic transport arrangements. At least Edinburgh airport was quiet, the rugby fans still celebrating in town. But the expectation of a leisurely browse round a selection of malt whiskies was upset by the feeling of urgency generated by a departure board announcing that the flight was already boarding, well before departure time. The flight left on time and arrived early. The DeliveryDemon expected problems on arrival, given the publicity Terminal 5 has attracted, so the quick baggage arrival came as a surprise.

Just a step on the way Of course, whatever expectations the advertising raises, Heathrow is not a destination in its own right, and the hapless traveller is often faced with an onward journey of a few miles which takes considerably longer than the flight.

London Underground For decades, a big red circle with a blue bar through it has raised the expectations that a Tube station is nearby. It’s a simple, brash, logo whose message is well known. Brash, not sophisticated, and that’s the problem. When designers are let loose on the signage of a transport hub, the prissy result has no place for such a dominant and informative graphic. They tone it down so it doesn’t stand out among all the other information. The result is that the tired traveller, looking for train or toilet or taxi, has to search through an undistinguished clutter of signs for the information they need. Not good for the traveller, not good for the traffic flow, and not particularly clever, given that the purpose of signage is to deliver information. So it is at Terminal 5.

And finally the train home Saturday evening. London. The last train. One might expect it to be full of happy people who followed a show with a meal and a glass or two of wine before returning home. Not with East Midland Trains’ final departure at 10.30. It made a nailbiting journey from Heathrow for the DeliveryDemon who couldn’t be sure if she could expect to catch the last train, or have to rely on the slow and uncomfortable line which goes no further than Bedford. And not knowing the train meant having to buy the ticket on the day. UK trains are notoriously expensive, but who would expect the cost of a single ticket to be the same price as a return?

It was just an overnight visit to Edinburgh for a meeting. But what a lot of expectations and assumptions arose. Some were met or well managed, others not. If that’s the expectation pattern for a single person on a simple trip, how much more varied and complex are the expectations and assumptions of the many stakeholders over the lifetime of a project? For a project manager, expectation management is a serious business, and a major factor in the success of a project. Forget this at your peril!

There’s More to Risk Than Probability

The DeliveryDemon is a Management of Risk (MoR) Practitioner so she is used to thinking of risk in terms of probability, impact and proximity:

• How likely is it?
• What’s the worst case scenario if it happens?
• Is it likely to come to pass soon or in the distant future?

June’s issue of Project Manager Today contains an article by David Hillson on risk perception, which refers to work by risk psychology researcher Dr Paul Slovic on factors which influence perceptions of risk. DeliveryDemon thinks that Dr Slovic’s work should be considered in the light of existing well-established MoR tools for identifiying and managing risk.

‘Dread If the outcome of a particular risk is something we imagine to be terrible…., our perception of the risk is heightened.’ Simply not true. The outcome (impact) is part and parcel of the risk, not something separate. The worse the potential outcome, the greater the risk. An illness with a 40% fatality rate is 100% fatal to the unfortunate 40%. The dread is associated with that harsh 100%, which is a factual numerical component of the risk, not just a perception.

‘Control When we believe we have control we perceive the risk as lower.’ When we have control we have tools to manage risk. Different people make different choices because tolerance of risk varies from person to person, and from organisation to organisation. If we have control we may choose, at one extreme to walk away from the risk, or at the other extreme, to live with it. We may take action to reduce the risk, or to pass the risk on to someone else. The decision may be not to drive that Porsche through the icy hairpin bends of a mountain pass, or to do it anyway and live with the consequences. The risk may be reduced with snow chains, or passed (partially) to someone else through an insurance policy with a good vehicle replacement clause. None of these options are available to the trussed up prisoner of a car thief whose drug intake has sent his risk tolerance sky high. Control allows the individual to match risk and risk tolerance. There is logic to this, not just perception.

‘Natural vs Man-Made Hazards resulting from human actions are seen as more risky than natural hazards.’  Control comes into this again. The geographical distribution of natural hazards is well known and people may choose not to live on the San Andreas Fault or the slopes of Stromboli. If brought up in a danger area and tied to it by family commitments, people know the warning signs and have learned ways of predicting and mitigating the problems. These days, people who find the risk level too great often have the option of moving away. Man-made hazards follow a different timescale. The announcement of a planned man-made hazards affects a previously blight free area, and individual inhabitants have little say over the introduction of the risk or its management, so have no tools available to match the risk to their risk tolerance.

‘Choice If I have some choice over my exposure to a risk then it seems lower than if I am exposed involuntarily.’  This comes back to control. If I have choices I am able to mitigate the risk by reducing the probability, the impact, the proximity. I can match the risk to my risk tolerance. Again, this is not merely a matter of perception. Choice allows us to alter numerical risk factors.

‘Children Any risk which affects children is seen as worse than one which affects only adults.’ Possibly. There are cultures which venerate childhood, and cultures which view children as more replaceable than their parents. DeliveryDemon is not an anthropologist so isn’t going to comment on this one.

‘Novelty New risks are seen as being higher than ones we have grown used to seeing’. A variation of ‘familiarity breeds contempt’. This is an extremely simplistic view. When a risk is new, less knowledge is available. The cautious will weight their risk assessment pessimistically to allow for that lack of knowledge. However, those with a stake in the risk source may equally discount the risk level on the basis that there is, as yet, no evidence to substantiate the risk, a common statement during discussions of the risks of large-scale GM planting. The Novelty factor may work either way. Similarly, lack of novelty can work to increase or decrease actual risk. That the building industry has a has a high level of injury and fatality may be attributable to a macho attitude to risk which leads to the cautious being viewed as wimps. The culture creates an additional risk which needs to be managed. In the abstract, extreme sports offer a higher level of risk than a building site, but the culture is very different. Conventions and support mechanisms have evolved such as diver buddying, parachute checking, frostbite checking, mountain rescue. There is an interest in the development of the individual and of technology to enable boundaries to be pushed. Participants court a dangerous edge, but they also seek the risk mitigation tools which will allow them to push beyond current boundaries.

‘Publicity If a risk has a high profile in the media… it will be perceived as being more risky.’ This is all about understanding the impact. A dry paragraph mentioning an explosion in a distant city leaves it to the imagination to guess the impact, whereas a picture of mangled bodies leaves little room for doubt. The fact of publicity has less impact on risk perception than does the presentation of the published content. The theory behind this underpins the entire advertising industry. At the other extreme it can be used to explain mass hysteria. Publicity is less of a risk modifier than a risk in its own right. For example, late last summer there was a risk of severe economic downturn. Publicity helped it on its way by making people fear for the future to the extent that consumer spending was drastically reduced. It was less the fact of economic threat than the way it was presented in the media which prompted that. For example, the BBC might be expected to provide a dispassionate view of the situation, but Robert Peston’s highly emotive reporting style was a significant influence on consumer decisions to cut back on spending.

‘Propinquity If I could be a victim the importance of the risk seems higher than it really is.’  The word ‘seems’ is inappropriate here, as is ‘importance’. Impact is as important as probability when assessing a risk. If I am assessing a risk from a personal perspective, the 10% probability of occurrence is only a small part of the story if the impact is 100% fatality. The risk is genuinely greater, it is not just perception.

‘Risk – Benefit Trade-off If exposure to a risk could also result in a perceived benefit as well as a threat, the risk is discounted.’ Business case, anyone? It’s not actually a discounting of risk, more a balancing. It can be done on the basis of gut feel or total logic or a mixture of the two. Benefits may blind people to the risks but not necessarily. The DeliveryDemon knows that mountains and mountain weather can be dangerous, and has a lot of experience of assessing the risk. That doesn’t stop her heading out in (nearly) all weathers in search of benefits such as air like wine, panoramic views, solitude, wildlife, crisp snowfields and icewalls and glaciers, a good downhill run, or even a blast of wind and weather. The balancing bit of risk management is the prior selection of equipment, assessment of fitness, and choice of route. It’s not discounting of risk, it’s a balancing act.

‘Trust Where protection from risk is offered by a trusted party the risk is perceived as lower.’  In MoR terms this is transfer of risk, and the insurance industry is a classic example of it. It works by reducing the actual numerical risk at the impact level. If I’m travelling, insurance doesn’t reduce the probability of my luggage going missing, but it does reduce the impact because I can reclaim the cost from the insurance company.

The DeliveryDemon finds Dr Slovic’s classifications quite naive and much prefers MoR’s simple, factual and pragmatic analysis as a tool for programme and project managers.

Project / Programme Delivery and Service Delivery – Is There A Conflict?

(Shamelessly taken from a reply the DeliveryDemon provided to a question on LinkedIn)

Do you see a conflict?

The main interfaces with service delivery are:

• When defining the scope of the project, acknowledge that there will be an impact on service delivery, and involve the stakeholders who can form a view of the impact and how it is likely to affect other priorities, and take decisions.
• During the design / delivery / test stages of a project, identify and involve the service delivery stakeholders needed to provide input / carry out activities / test.
•  As part of dependency management, identify dependencies / resource conflicts with other projects also impacting service delivery, establish a suitable level of communication with them.
•  For transition to business as usual, allow for testing and business change within the service delivery function.

All of the above are down to planning and communication and should not be a significant source of conflict if well managed.

There is only ONE intrinsic and irresolvable conflict between programmes / projects and service delivery. Service delivery is there to deliver a service and that is their first priority. In the event of a serious incident, restoring the service has first priority.

In the event of a serious incident, all the programme / project manager can do is:

• Keep tabs on the incident resolution without hassling those at the sharp end.
• Make use where possible of resource not involved in the incident, provided their workload has not increased to cover colleagues dealing with the incident.
• Carry out an impact analysis, work on a contingency plan and implement it.
• Keep the project / programme stakeholders informed.
• Escalate only in the event that it is likely senior management will give the project priority over the service.
• Keep the morale of the team up when they can’t make progress.
• When the pressure lifts, get in there with the key stakeholders to ensure that the programme / project gets appropriate priority as the pressure comes off.

Putting the ‘Live’ into Delivery

The DeliveryDemon has recently had the good fortune to spend time with some world class athletes. They are at the very top of a highly demanding minority sport and the pressure to deliver is intense.

• In competition there is no second chance to deliver the goods. Just a little less than top performance on the day, and the medal goes to someone else.
• Delivery in competition depends on rigorous training and other preparation prior to competition. It’s not just a one-day effort.
• There’s a lot of risk management to consider – highly trained athletes operate on the fine line between top fitness and injury, where a brief misjudgement can lead to weeks of layoff.
• It’s impossible to operate at competition level all the time, and athletes need a cycle of preparation, peak performance, and relaxation / recuperation.

There’s another aspect of minority sports where delivery comes into play. In the absence of commercial sponsorhips, athletes may fund their training by coaching others. Some may branch out into the production of specialist clothing and equipment for their sports. Since minority sports by their nature have a limited number of participants, the coach or equipment supplier will become known quite quickly. They will be judged both by the quality of what they sell, and their sporting achievements. Other participants will quickly become aware of any new or innovative products which they introduce to the marketplace. Equally, news of poor delivery is quickly passed around.

There is a surprising number of well-run small businesses in this field. Because the reputations of the business and its owner are intertwined, the athlete is under intense pressure to deliver quality in competitive results and quality in goods and services. There is also a need to balance peaks of performance with periods which allow for both physical recovery and product development. The athlette lives constantly with a focus on delivery.

The principles which apply to delivery by these micro businesses are equally applicable to large scale commercial enterprises. However, the complexity of large organisations means that they often lose this single-minded focus on customer delivery. Large organisations often look to high profile sportsmen to deliver training on individual motivation. They would do well to look closely at the less well-funded areas of sport. These microbusinesses provide a delivery benchmark which many large companies are incapable of equalling.

Cats Don’t Do Risk Management

A couple of ginger kittens decided to take up home with our neighbours last year. They are now just about adult and curious about everything. And dangerous into the bargain.

We were heading out for a quiet evening walk when we noticed that another neighbour’s house had acquired a ginger cat on its steeply pitched roof. It had obviously scrabbled up a fence onto an equally steep garage roof and leapt across the small gap to the main house. As we watched, it turned to make its way back down, dabbing a tentative paw on the row of tiles below. The tiles, it seems, were slippy, and the cat didn’t like it. The cat headed upwards till it reached the roof ridge. Attempts to come down the far side were equally unsuccessful – the cat was stuck up there.

When the owners realised the cat’s predicament, the ladder came out. Up climbed our neighbour onto the garage roof – as slippery to his trainers as the main roof to the cat’s paws. The cat made a few tentative moves towards him but just couldn’t manage to reverse the moves it made to get to that position. Other members of the household tried to tempt it with various titbits, all to no avail. Cats are normally to cool to look terrified but this one was quaking every time it placed a tentative paw on the downward slope.

Eventually the cat decided to chance all with a slithering descent of the roof and a leap over to the garage, narrowly avoiding dislodging the neighbour’s footing. The neighbour edged his way down the garage roof, down the ladder safely to the ground. Happy ending, so why is the DeliveryDemon talking about Risk Management?

Well, in going from fence to garage to roof the cat gave no thought to its ability to reverse the moves. It certainly didn’t think about the consequences of a move going wrong. No way did it consider potential consequences such as:

• A pathetic starved ginger-furred skeleton on the roof ridge
• A flat cat on the ground
• A flat neighbour on the ground
• Dramatic fire engine rescue of cat and / or neighbour

Cats are egotistical optimists, confident that things cannot go wrong for them, or that the universe will sort things out if it does. When they decide on a course of action, it’s the one which best suits their purpose at the time. There’s no thought of consequences for others, no thought of an exit strategy.

Does this sound like anyone you know? The DeliveryDemon gets very nervous when she identifies a ‘cat’ on a project team. If a team member is making decisions without considering and communicating the knock-on risks to their own work and to others, that’s putting the whole project at risk. That’s one reason why informal project communication is so important – it’s the only chance you have of identifying this feline attitude to risk BEFORE the consequences start to hit.

Do you have any cats on your project team?

Seriously Extreme Project Management

Think of a project with all the odds stacked against it:

• High profile
• Highly competitive situation
• Complex logistics
• Short and inflexible time span
• Small team of strong minded individualistic experts
• Extremely high level of risk
• Absolutely zero tolerance when it comes to simultaneous delivery of all 6 elements of the project

Photographer and elite athlete Tony Lamiche had 5 days to deliver a single photograph showing all 6 major mountain sports in action:

• Climbing
• Speedriding
• BASE jumping
• Skiing
• Paragliding
• Snowboarding

Look at http://tinyurl.com/6mountainsports for the most impressive example of project delivery the DeliveryDemon has ever seen.

Surprise, surprise – Risk Management

The DeliveryDemon was interested to see some risk management being discussed in the US Treasury.

The US bank bailout includes the setting up of a public-private partnership to buy up toxic assets. As this Reuters article http://tinyurl.com/carurp explains:

• The cost risk to taxpayers outweighs the potential for benefits
• Conflicts of interest have been identified and recognised as a source of risk
• The scheme is inherently vulnerable to fraud, money laundering and other forms of abuse
• The ‘public’ element of the public-private partnership dilutes the risk for the private element, increasing the likelihood of a high risk approach to managing the overall funds

What is surprising is that these risks are being so publicly and simply stated. The early days of most public-private partnerships are normally wreathed in a mist of bonhomie as each party strives to protect and enhance its relationship with the other party. Reservations are rarely made public.

The DeliveryDemon will be interested to see how strongly this risk management and transparency is followed through. And whether the UK takes a lead from the US when it comes to acknowledging and managing the risks associated with the UK government’s bank bailouts.