Managing a successful project needs a high level of stakeholder management on an ongoing basis. So who are stakeholders? 

Stakeholder analysis is the process of identifying the individuals or groups that are likely to affect or be affected by the project outcome and sorting stakeholders according to their impact on the project and the impact the project will have on them. It is not only a critical process in the initiation phase of the project (best practice is to revisit it at least after each project phase if possible) but also sometime becomes factor for success of the project especially for the large enterprise wide programs. The output information helps in effectively managing the stakeholders by meeting their expectations and gaining their confidence.

Stakeholder analysis can entail below activities;

• Capture and document the characteristics of key stakeholders.
• Capture the interests of stakeholders in relation to the problems that the project is seeking to address
• Capture conflicts of interests between stakeholders helping to manage such relationships later in the project
• Capture relations between stakeholders that may enable “coalitions” of project sponsorship, ownership and cooperation
• Identify the capacity of different stakeholders and stakeholder groups to participate
• Capture and document appropriate level of participation by stakeholders e.g. inform, consult, partnership or all of these

So chances are more people your project impacts by its outcome and activities, it’s obvious that more people will also have some degree of influence over the projects direction in a positive or negative way. Some of these “impacted “will likely benefit directly or indirectly and will become supporters in your endeavors. Similarly people who are likely to impacted negatively by the project will block the project activities or act in a manner to delay. Hence it is important to ensure to cultivate more supporters and engage affected for managing their expectations to an extent possible without digressing on the project’s deliverables or products. Therefore it is essential to analyze these stakeholders from the perspective of your project. For simplicity, project stakeholders can be classified in following types.

Classification of Stakeholders

1. Primary stakeholders: are those ultimately affected, either positively or negatively by an organization’s actions.
2. Secondary stakeholders: are the ‘intermediaries’, that is, persons or organizations who are indirectly affected by an organization’s actions.
3. Key stakeholders: have significant influence upon or importance within an organization (they can be part of either two groups above)

Managing Stakeholder expectations

Essentially you will need to develop a strong working relationship with key stakeholders. Primary or Key stakeholders are required to be engaged proactively time to time for consultation, key decisions, support and selling the benefits of project outcome to ensure the strategic objectives of the project or  program are achieved. This also draws on the robust communication management to keep these stakeholders engaged and abreast of current challenges, issues and any significant success through regular communication and in person interactions to meet their information needs. The communication plan may document who receives communications, when, how and to what level of detail. Protocols may be established including security and need to know parameters.

Key Benefits of Stakeholder analysis / Managing Expectations;

• Influential stakeholders can be identified early and their input can then be used to shape the scope and deliverables
• Cultivating support from the powerful stakeholders will help the engagement win more resource, thus making the project or program more likely to succeed.
• The project and program management team identify conflicting or competing objectives among stakeholders early and draft plan to resolve the potential issues
• By engaging and interacting with stakeholders early and frequently, the  team can ensure that they fully understand and are convinced of the benefits of project goals

So you have landed a project that has a defined and well documented scope and deliverables. You also have the required authority and power to manage the resources required to deliver the product of the project. Before you start using the resources you may want to double check who are these resources are and how much they would cost the project to deliver. This is especially true in case you are dependent on any external resource or consultant to bring in that much needed expertise your internal resources do not have. The trap essentially is the hidden costs that do not seem quite obvious in the beginning.

Let’s say you need an architect to design the database of your new application and internally either you do not have resources with relevant expertise or these resources are not available to your project. In your budget, you may have considered X Hours for this activity at the @ of Y dollars. However when this consultant arrives to start work on the database, you may realize that he needs a laptop to work on with all required software fully loaded!

Did you consider the lodging and boarding expense if applicable along with software license cost in your budget? How long will it take to get these required software and laptop to arrange? Will this consultant have any other productive project activities to do in the meantime or will those hours be a strain on your pocket? Are there any other tasks that might be impacted due to delay in database creation costing you additional dollars? It may not be possible to fully estimate all the unforeseen expenses but with some careful advance planning you can minimize the damage or have cheaper alternates in place!

Jason Young, maintains in his article “High Performance & Corporate Culture” that it is not a set of core values developed by a small group of people at an off-site leadership meeting. It is not always what a chief executive describes in an annual report or shareholder’s meeting. In fact, corporate culture is not always what the leadership team of an organization says or thinks it is. What an organization assumes, believes values, accepts, and promotes, produces and the way in which behavior occurs frames its corporate culture.

Why is culture so important? Strong corporate cultures outlast the influence of even the strongest leader. That’s the reason Apple will not only survive but also thrive in post Jobs era if it is able to maintain its culture that Jobs build during that last decade and half. The importance of corporate culture in success of an organization and longevity cannot be overstated. “An organization’s norms and values aren’t formed through speeches but through actions and team learning. Strong cultures have teeth. They are much more than slogans and empty promises. Some organizations choose to part ways with those who do not manage according to the values and behaviors that other employees embrace. The above is outlined by Harvard Business School professors Jim Heskett and W. Earl Sasser with co-author Joe Wheeler in their new book “The Ownership Quotient”.
Culture, the human terrain of an organization, has real bearing on organizational success and performance. It affects communication, co-operation and learning. It can help explain why changes will prompt some employees to quit even when compensation is not affected, why a talented leader may flounder in a cultural mismatch and why incentives and individual psychology alone don’t predict results. Defining and delivering on the promise your organization’s culture can deliver tremendous internal and market-facing benefits.

Nurturing corporate culture: According to Jason, “In some companies, culture develops by default. In others, culture develops in ways that are conscious, intentional, and tangible.” Noting, Southwest Airlines is one example of a company that has created a work environment where people can do their best work. In fact, in the words of its former CEO, “We are looking for a particular type of person, regardless of what job category it is. We are looking for attitudes that are positive and for people who can lend themselves to causes.”

Several organizations have built a unique corporate culture over the time to meet demands of changing global competitive market place to reap a unique advantage. I remember a mid-size Indian IT firm initiating a successful, multiyear internal campaign in late 90s to focus the centricity of customer among thousands of its employees to cultivate high quality delivery & deeper customer engagement. It was a well thought out strategy that was dictated to materialize firm’s ambition to differentiate its position among global customers & transition in to tier 1 IT vendor at global level.

This underscores the fact that, the buy in among the people of entire organization is very critical as it accelerate the motivational environment and allows people to do what they do best as they start seeing alignment between organizational values and individual behavior in broader context. The whole process needs active support from top leadership, constant communication to keep people focused on stated or desired culture.

Shyam Verma, PMP, ITIL-F,
Program & portfolio Management
LinkedIn: spverma. Twitter: Shammy1

The PMO also acts as the owner of the project management approach and supports project managers to utilize common project management practices, procedures and process templates. In addition, the PMO will serve as a place for providing organizational view of the status of all projects and can report on the improvements being made to project outcome over time.

Although PMOs can be established to provide a narrow or broad set of services, this list includes many of the common responsibilities a full PMO would perform.The key value of a  project management office includes:

•     Optimizes delivery cycle time due to better insight in to delivery processes
•     Optimizes delivery costs by pruning to non value added activities
•     Improves quality of project deliverables in mid to long run
•     Early identification and proactive management of project issues and risks
•     Fosters sound project management best practices
•     Better containment and management of project scope & risks
•     More opportunities to leverage and reuse historical project knowledge
•     Improves accuracy of estimates by applying standard organization baselines
•     Better communication with clients and stakeholders
•     Improves perceptions of your organization by your clients
•     Improves people and resource management ensuring optimized uses of scarce resources
•     Reduces time to get up to speed on new projects by applying client specific tailored processes

At an industry level, a PMO is increasingly being seen as an important component required to the  success of projects, and hence, major contributor to the future success of the entire organization. At a more operational level, the value provided by a PMO is indispensable.

1. Who needs what information
2. When will they need it
3. From who

Ensure that everyone part of the program understands their roles & responsibilities, program objectives and as some items may not be explicit. It may be possible to have different type of communication techniques for different audience e.g. sponsors & senior executives may only want executive summary with key issues and achievements in a dashboard instead of detailed report. The same thing is not true for the other stakeholders so don’t assume unless you are sure. Also know when and where to use written or verbal communication tools.

• Language: Language is probably last frontier of international trade. More than 65% of world workforce does not speak English. Therefore it is a key challenge in most global programs. You can reduce the damage to some extent by:

1. Using simple sentences
2. Avoiding jargon
3. Speaking slowly
4. Using multiple channels
5. Confirming understanding
6. Seeking acknowledgements
   

• Culture: In some regions business culture has significant impact on ways of life. For example in the Middle East, Islam guides most social and business behavior whereas in China, same can be said about Confucianism, Japan poses many intricacies of etiquette & protocol developed out of their uniquely hierarchical society.

• Time zones: Though this may sound like a non-issue but pay attention here to ensure the meetings outside time zones of some teams are well notified in advance and only set to accomplish critical decisions or discussion not for routine and mundane tasks.

• People & politics: In an outsourcing environment with multiple vendors, there are process and political challenges in knowledge transfers, hand offs and roles and responsibilities unless carefully defined in advance as older vendors had better inroads into the client’s management chain. Same can be assumed in case of an outgoing person in charge in captive IT department. Therefore it is of utmost importance to do some groundwork to have clear queries to have the information and support you need.

To better understand this:

• Start with 40 hours a week

Use 40 hours a week as your default for full-time employment when calculating FTE hours for a project. Some projects may measure full-time status differently, such as 35 or 37.5 hours a week instead of 40, so be sure to adjust according to your project’s requirements.

•   Figure out the number of hours in a pay period

Figure out the number of hours in a pay period by multiplying the length of the pay period by 40 hours a week. For example, if your pay period is 2 weeks, your total number of hours in a pay period would be 80.

• Divide hours worked by hours in a pay period

Divide the number of hours your employee worked in a pay period by the total number of hours in that pay period. The total equals your FTE hours. If an employee worked 40 hours out of 80 hours in a pay period, your total would be 0.5 FTE. It’s that simple!

1. Who RAISED the change?
2. What is the REASON for the change?
3. What is the RETURN required from the change?
4. What are the RISKS involved in the change?
5. What resources are REQUIRED to deliver the change?
6. Who is RESPONSIBLE for build, test & implementation of the change?
7. What is the RELATIONSHIP between this change and other changes?

Even though this is more of a service operations activity it can still be very useful in your project change management process simply because it allows you to analyze the potential change in its totality.

User stories

The benefits of achieving a working software in less money, better risk mitigation mechanism (because you test early and test often) and dependence on process not individuals is one of the key reasons that XP has become one of the most preferred software development methodologies in recent years. Agile practitioners term User stories to be “Technique of expressing requirements as user stories to be an effective approach on all time constrained projects and are a great way to begin introducing a bit of agility to your projects.”

If you happen to be one of those PMs who need to deliver your project in such fashion chances are you are most likely to use your scope statement e.g. project requirements in terms of user stories rather in standard functional requirement document. Hence it would be invaluable to know how you can employ user stories to define and plan project scope.

What are user stories?

A user story describes what functionality is required from the perspective of business users in simple or plain English running through different steps or stages to accomplish desired functionality. In simple terms, a user story provides the clear understanding of who wants the functionality, how it would work and why this functionality is required. In most cases user stories are written by customer or a customer representative working with a developer where developer may ask some questions to clarify the user actions but does not influence the idea creation process. User stories are used mostly in agile software development methodologies to provide the basis of features required in the software.

Development Process: While business user or customer narrates the scenario, developer makes notes on a 3×5 inch Card with functionality or requirement name, user action description, test condition, rough estimate and any other relevant point. For example, ” As a business user I want to be able to search for my customers by their first and last name,” or the “Application starts by bringing up the last document user was working with.”

The 3 basic tools used in the process are namely, Card as mentioned above, details around Conversation where details are noted as discussion with business user happens and thirdly Confirmation or Conditions that must be met for for the basis of user acceptance.

In case there is any ambiguity on the user story or it is deemed complex or too big the process of refinement is repeated until the story is concise and agreed by both user and developer. Please note the user story is not supposed to be definite business functionality and changes to the functionality are accepted at the time of development or even testing. From that perspective the process represents one of the key features of Agile development.

Advantages: User stories are a quick way of eliciting customer requirements without having to spend too much effort on formalized requirement documentation and bypassing overloaded administrative tasks for maintaining them. The purpose of user story is to respond promptly with less overhead in rapidly changing real-world requirements

Limitation: since the User stories are informal way to elicit requirement the test scenario for acceptance purposes should be in place without which the implementation of the requirement do not have customer acceptance.

There are three basic tools used in the process namely Card as mentioned above. Secondly details around Conversations where details are noted as discussion with business user happens and thirdly Confirmation or conditions that must be met for acceptance.

• Scope statement: at times the scope of your project is not very clearly defined from the beginning or is under defined to say the least. Please remember the scope statement that was prepared at the time of Pre-Sales stages or before the actual analysis phase may not be sufficient or complete. So spend some time verifying the fact if some additional things made their way or something that was cut to meet timeline or budget constraint. It is a good practice to serialize key business requirements for estimation of time and cost. Also remember the initial scope statement is only for an interim period until the scope definition is completed as part of planning phase.
• Objectivity of outcome: compare the statement “Improve service by providing an information system to respond to customer inquiries.” With “Able to answer customer queries last 2 monthly statements and last 60 days transaction over the phone.” Clearly focusing on the outcome brings more clarity and saves lot of vagueness and future disputes with your customer over actual intent. It is recommended that scope definition or project charter is developed in iteration essentially with customer involvement using an authorized document format.
• Managing Scope Creep: This is a common problem where requirements are not clear and complete. Essentially this is due to incorrect interpretation of the requirements or due to requirement gaps in the scope definition. Sometime additional requirements come up after more clarity emerges or there are changes in stakeholder expectations due to changes in external environments. Therefore it is essential that your project plan has provision to incorporate and approve new requirements and modifications in existing one after careful consideration of impacts by project CCB (change control board) or governance board
• Project deliverables: An internal deliverable is something that project produces as part of the project for internal use e.g. E-R diagram while an external deliverable is something that project team provides to the business users. I have seen some PMOs require that assigned PMs define internal and external deliverables (with agreed templates) and track at least phase by phase to ensure timely delivery and sign off with customer. This is a good practice and provides a level of comfort and confidence to the stakeholders as well.
• Functional specifications: Scope definitions could be done using multiple techniques. This could also help in closing missed gaps. One of the techniques is to capture major functionalities by using decomposition. This could be done at the same time with data definition if possible. However if that is not practical the functional specification could provide the required data requirement.
• Specify Assumptions: Each project initiatives have some or the other dependencies represented by assumptions. It is recommended that each of these assumptions are documented at relevant deliverables and followed up at the earliest. As the false assumptions could pose potential challenges to the project plans in terms of schedule milestones, resources, quality and cost constraints.

While most project managers focus too much on these two constraints however the biggest issue that results in to time as well as cost overrun is not able to manage scope of the defined project. Therefore, a tight definition and active management of project scope can not only deliver instant results but also relive you of unnecessary squeeze on your project resources.

Here are few that I think would go a long way to bring about some sure positive changes if followed with some rigor.

1. Track time and budget effectively: After all most project have schedule or budget as one of its success criteria so have a keen eye for these numbers. Set a regular recurring time slot to review them on weekly or bi-weekly basis and don’t forget to check the data source for any further data refinement needed. You may also plot these data points for graphical view to see emerging trends especially projects sensitive to budget, schedule or both.
2. Use checklists: Despite advancements in processes or technology, we are ever busier by day and have to deal with lot of complexity and several critical tasks competing for our attention. A checklist is a very simple quality tool but one of the most effective one to employ for those critical tasks that need to be processed or can’t be missed.
3. Meet Effectively: Some of the common best practices to focus for next year are pretty basic but also effective. My personal favorite is to send out your meeting material at least 1 day in advance not just before meeting start time! Another thing that helps is to have a well thought out agenda and expectations from the meeting participants so they come prepared. Keeping the meeting time short and discussion on tracking items too is a greatly appreciated
4. Safety and security: With growth of technical advancement the safety and security concern to project personnel and assets is increasing too. This could be relevant to not only the core project team but the vendors and suppliers as well. So ensure your project safety goals and security policies are well laid out, your vendors and 3^rd party personnel are vetted with right set of access, physical and IT security norms are followed per requirements. Don’t forget to set aside some time slot for any mandatory training too.
5. Own your learning plan: Learning never stops in this highly dynamic world of today. As different sectors collide and collaborate at the same time, it is as chaotic today as never before. This demands continuous and exponential knowledge curve at the individual level. This is especially true since you can no longer depend on organizations to shape and take interest in your career goals. So one must have his or her career goals clearly defined based on the individual strength and personality.
6. Set realistic goals: we often realize that in trying to accomplish too much we set up ourselves to fail by setting goals which are too hard to achieve. The solution lies in being objective and breaking these down to smaller goals. For example instead of setting a goal to say delivering all projects on time and on budget, why not breaking it in to better scope and cost management which ultimately leads to project delays and cost overruns.
7. Networking: Don’t hang out just with your colleagues in Project management discipline. There is a greater awareness about importance of project management and many influential people like to hear about project management. LinkedIn and other professional networking sites are great places to build these networks.
8. Volunteer More: This is my personal favorite and the reason for that is that there are so many organizations who cannot afford a project manager due to financial constraint but believe me several of them offer much more challenging projects with great learning opportunities outside the top sectors such as IT and construction.