Tag: Stakeholder

Project Stakeholder Register and Organizational Chart: Useful tools for project stakeholder management

Written by Mark Romanelli on June 7, 2022. Posted in Articles.

Projects come in all sizes, and in most cases larger projects come with more potential complications. This is also true when projects involve multiple individuals and organizations. Successfully managing a project often means dealing with stakeholders beyond your immediate project team. Stakeholders are key to the success of any project, so identifying and managing stakeholders is a critical element of project management (Kissflow Project, 2021).

Project Stakeholders

Projects frequently involve different groups, individuals, and organizations who may affect, be affected by, or perceive itself to be affected by a decision, activity, or outcome of a project. These are known as project stakeholders (Project Management Institute, 2021). Project stakeholders can be broadly classified into two categories: Internal Stakeholders and External Stakeholders

Internal stakeholders generally include anyone within the organization conducting a project. It starts with the internal members of the project team, the project manager, and the project sponsor. The concept can also be expanded to include other individuals and within the organization or company, such as other teams and departments. Internal stakeholders are usually the easiest to identify because they are immediately known and often familiar.

External stakeholders include anyone affected by the project, its processes, or deliverables and outside of the organization conducting the project. These include external project clients, end-users of product outputs, suppliers, contractors, the government, and sometimes even members of the community where the project is taking place. The complete list of external stakeholders can be more challenging to identify as they can be new to each and every project. And of course, no complete list of stakeholders or stakeholder groups exists for each project!

Stakeholders, both internal and external, need to be identified. A project team should have access to information regarding their roles, responsibilities, and capabilities regarding the project. Stakeholder contact information is also essential to coordinate communication throughout the project and therefore it needs to be available to the core project team.

In addition to knowing who the project stakeholders are, a project team should know how they are organized and structured within the project environment. This is why using a project stakeholder register and organizational chart right from the very start can help to get a clear picture of the project organization and to manage communications throughout the project lifecycle.

The Tools

While project stakeholder management is its own knowledge area and functional discipline, knowing how to use two stakeholder management tools will help to organize stakeholder management for projects of all sizes: the stakeholder register and the project organizational chart.

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The Stakeholder Register

A stakeholder register is a document including the identification, assessment, and classification of project stakeholders (Project Management Institute, 2021). It is a list of the stakeholders involved in a project and the “need to know” information about them, kept accessible to members of the core project team.

The first step in creating a project stakeholder register is to identify the stakeholders involved in a project. Start with the internal stakeholders, and then move on to the external stakeholders. Think about who is involved with the project both directly and indirectly. Who might be affected by the project, its execution, and its outcome? What individuals or organizations have authority over different aspects of the project?

Next, determine what information is needed from each stakeholder and start collecting it. This starts with each individual’s name, position, role in the project, and contact information. For organizations and departments, it should include the individual contact person from that stakeholder group. Finally, any other relevant information or details pertaining to that stakeholder or stakeholder group that might be relevant to the specific project at hand.

Finally, compile the register. This can be done in any format the project team chooses to use. A simple spread sheet can serve the purpose, or something more organized like a contact management function in Microsoft Outlook or Google Contacts. Many project management software programs include a resources sheet just for this purpose with customizable fields to organize the details on each stakeholder based on their importance to the project. The most important criteria for the selection of a system to use is that it is accessible to the core members of the project team as they need to use it.

Project Organizational Chart

A project organizational chart is a document that graphically depicts the project team members and their interrelationships for a specific project (Project Management Institute, 2021). It is a visual representation of the stakeholder register indicating how various stakeholders are positioned within the project. A projects organization structure is usually fairly obvious for small projects, but the importance of knowing and understanding the structure becomes more significant as projects grow in size and number of stakeholders. Understanding the organization of the project stakeholders helps in defining relationships, allocating responsibilities, authority, and tasks (San Cristóbal, 2018).

The project organizational chart can be as simple as a tree diagram or a bubble chart. More important than its design is its function and purpose, which is to understand the relationships among and between project stakeholders and to communicate this information at a glance.

Best Practices

With the tools in place, following a few best practices in creating a stakeholder register and a project organizational chart will help in coordinating project stakeholder management.

Consider Frequent Project Stakeholders
Start Early
Involve Others
Stress Test

Consider Frequent Project Stakeholders

In many organizations, project work is the normal mode of operations. If your organization frequently works with projects, then there is a good chance that many of the project stakeholders, both internal and external, will be the same across multiple projects. Having a list of stakeholders and their contact details ready to go will save time in creating a project register for each project once stakeholders are identified.

Start Early

The process of identifying stakeholders ideally starts once an organization selects and approves a project. By doing so, they can be kept involved, contacted, and consulted as necessary throughout the following stages of project development (Kissflow Project, 2021).

Involve Others

When considering details about individual stakeholders roles, responsibilities, and capabilities, it can be valuable to involve the individual stakeholders themselves, where practical, in collecting these details. This allows for a more complete collection of information and to gain a different perspective.

Stress Testing

Once the stakeholder register and project organizational chart are completed, share them as appropriate with other project stakeholders and members of your organization. As with the process of involving others, it helps to gain a different perspective on the information compiled. Additional feedback will help to improve the accuracy, and therefore the usability, of both tools.

Understanding the needs, structure, and expectations of project stakeholders can be a critically important aspect of achieving project success. Knowing the basics of project stakeholder management, as well as how to create and use a stakeholder register and project organizational chart, will go a long way toward successful stakeholder management in all types of projects.

Get the Right Answers to Make the Right Decisions

Written by George Pitagorsky on May 24, 2022. Posted in Articles.

“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on it, I would use the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.” – Albert Einstein

Decisions solve problems and are the forerunners of action. According to Oxford Language a decision is “a conclusion or resolution reached after consideration.” Decision making is “the action or process of deciding something or of resolving a question.”

Decision making is at the heart of effective performance. It is a complex process that relies on a combination of both external, interpersonal, and intrapersonal factors.

Stepping Back to Consider

Einstein’s estimate of how long it would take to solve the problem may be optimistic for those of us lacking the genius’ intellect, but the ability to step back and ask the right questions is critical to being an effective decision maker. The principle is true for individuals and teams alike.

The primary definition of decision says one is made after consideration of questions to uncover and narrow down alternatives, make sure that there is understanding of the problem, and to focus attention on critical issues.

“The affect of asking the right question is statistically profound. … we saw that asking the right question increased the odds of someone’s work having a positive affect on others by 4.1 times. It made the outcome 3.1 times more likely to be deemed important, 2.8 times more likely to create passion in the doer, and perhaps most significant to company leaders, 2.7 times more likely to make a positive impact on the organization’s bottom line.”

What to Consider?

What are the proper questions? For example the question “Why is it that when we want to call and talk to a person, we have to call a place?” asked by a Motorola project manager charged with creating the next generation of car radiotelephone led ultimately to the personal mobile phone rather than to a solution that focused on a location, whether at home, in office, or in a car.

Why

There are seven questions that are widely accepted as the basics for getting the right information for making a decision – who, what, when, where, why, how, and how much. Of these, the why question, is the most controversial and often the most difficult to ask.

A brief internet search uncovers articles that insist on asking why and those that say not to ask why because it is too confrontative and often comes from being judgmental as opposed to being curious. Of course, it depends on the context and the reason for the question.

In the context of project management, “why?” is a critical question that helps to make effective decisions.

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Do or Die

Imagine being a project manager who has been assigned a project that must deliver a specified result in six weeks. You ask, “Why that result and in that time frame?” If the response is “Because the client wants it?” do you push back?

Or do you walk away ready to give your team the same answer you got from your boss or the customer contact person? Telling them “Ours is not to wonder why. Ours is just to do or die.”

Would the client be averse to the “why” question? If so, “Why? How about if the question were rephrased as, “We often find that there are several ways to achieve your business goals and some are often better than the solution we first think of. Can we explore the reason for your objective so that we might be able to better serve you?”

Note the possibilities here. The client might be completely closed to any other solutions and require that you “do or die.” Or, the client might be interested and open minded enough to identify the reasons for the objectives and be open to alternative solutions that would be less costly and more effective at achieving business objectives.

That is why wise project managers insist upon getting answers to the proper questions. Failure to do so not only makes for suboptimal solutions, but putsd the manager and team in a position to take the blame for it.

The Right/Proper Questions

Detectives ask questions to uncover means, motive and opportunity. Project managers may ask questions that take them “out of the box of conventional thinking, but they must ask questions that consider the situation at hand:

Are expectations rational?
What will happen if we don’t ask the right questions?
What are the business goals and project objectives?
Why are they the objectives?
Are there alternative objectives that would achieve the goals?
What are the criteria for success? Why? Who established them? Who will determine if they have been met?
What are the consequences of failure? Of success?
What are the risks that might get in the way of success? What are their likelihood and impact?
When will the project be performed and when is it expected to be completed?
What human and material resources are needed? Why? What quality characteristics must they have? Are there alternatives?
Are the resources available? When will they be needed? Why? How could they be made available?
What is the project environment like? Can it be made more “friendly” to project performance?
Who are the stakeholders and what are their roles and responsibilities?
Who will be impacted by the project’s performance and its results? How will they be impacted? How can impact be influenced to make it more positive?
What is the project history – e.g., was this or a similar project performed in the past? How can lessons learned be used to inform the current team?
What procedures and tools will be used? Why? Are there alternatives?

Courage and Patience

Often, everyone wants to just get on with the work, to “just do it.” It takes courage and patience to take the time and effort to step back and ask the proper questions, even in the face of resistance by key stakeholders to explore reasons and alternatives.

Stakeholder Register: The Unsung Hero

Written by Tony Oliver on February 8, 2022. Posted in Articles.

Who is your favorite superhero from the multi-billion-dollar movie franchise Avengers?

Most people would respond with the Hulk, Spiderman, Captain America, or Iron-Man. After all, those characters have been mainstays of Marvel comics for many decades. But they are far from the only ones in the series: Ant-man, Hawkeye, Black Widow, and the Scarlet Witch are a few of the lesser-known members of the super team. Every group has some members who get the glory and front-billing, but it does not mean the others are not essential. Chances are you may have worked on a project in which some of your colleagues’ overshadowed others.

Among project management artifacts, the stakeholder is such an unsung hero. The Who? The What? Exactly.

Chances are your extended project team, or even your sponsor doesn’t know about this document, or why it’s important. But you, as the project manager, should be keen on its powers. Think of how to alter egos that are underestimated in the superhero world, or how smaller members are overlooked until they rise to the occasion and save the day.

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Remember all those Shakespeare plays you read in high school? Before the first act, the “dramatis personae” were listed. The descriptions often gave you an idea of their relationship and any conflict which may ensue. Navigating the play without such information would be difficult. Hamlet’s name may title the play, but you’d want to also know about Claudius and his schemes.

The charter, the schedule, and the project management plan get all the glory, but the stakeholder register is key to understanding the others. After all, a project takes people not just to perform the work but also to benefit from the product. Without understanding the stakeholders’ needs, a project will likely miss the mark. This translates not just to a lost opportunity for the organization but also wasted time, money, and goodwill.

The stakeholder management plan also helps keep track of triple constraint impact. We often focus on the project’s priorities, but constraints also exist at the stakeholder and requirement levels. Understanding what makes each stakeholder tick is integral to successfully managing those needs. For younger project managers raised on role-playing games (computer or tabletop), the stakeholder management plan can best be described as a matrix of all the traits and abilities of each participant.

Project managers often fall into the trap of believing stakeholder management is logical and thus can be done on the fly. Others may think their interpersonal skills enable stakeholder management to flow naturally. Seasoned project managers know better, aware of the manners in which stakeholder attitudes may change throughout the project. One’s best friend may become one’s bitter enemy, and a strong proponent may suddenly turn into a source of undesired criticism. Being aware of the stakeholder’s desires and personalities can help the PM prepare for, and avoid such landmines.

Some projects run into difficulties due to the stakeholder management plan not being written down, but this often stems not from laziness but rather a mistaken belief that the PM “knows all about the stakeholders.” Project managers, no matter their tenure in the organization, should not fall into this trap. Crafting the stakeholder management plan:

Helps other team members, whose tenure and experience may be limited and not have relationships with the stakeholders. Think about when you first started working for your company, or when you first took on your current role. Your network was likely limited both in terms of knowledge depth and breadth. A well-curated list of stakeholders can save your team from spinning around in circles to find out who is affected by the project and to what degree.
Can assist when a stakeholder leaves the organization and a new one comes into the vacated role. It would be ideal to have a project where the stakeholders do not change…but that seldom happens. People retire, take new jobs, are moved to new roles; while some may adequately train their replacements and help them understand their role in the project, PMs should not assume this would always happen. The stakeholder register can help identify gaps and prepare for such personnel transitions.
Can help clear misunderstandings. Conflict is unavoidable in projects, but the team should be well-versed on how to solve it. Confusion, on the other hand, can often fester if not clarified. The stakeholder register, when easily accessible by the team, can clarify roles, responsibilities, and areas of interest. Note the stakeholder interest and influence matrix will expand on the topic, so don’t rely on the register by itself.
Can facilitate conversations on Roles & Responsibilities. As the project team goes through the Tuckman team Development stages, questions will arise on roles and responsibilities. The stakeholder register can help guide such conversations, proactively prompting the team to analyze who is best suited to tackle individual tasks and oversee specific areas. Vetting these duties against the involved stakeholder areas ensures no affected department is forgotten.
Can help craft the change management plan. I’m a firm believer that change management and project management are the two wings of a bird; you need both to fly. A successful change management plan covers the what, how, why, when, where, and how of the current state: future state transition. You can get a head start by ensuring your stakeholder register is complete and thorough.

As with other project management artifacts, it’s key to remember the stakeholder management plan should be revised as needs arise. However, it should always be connected to the underlying stakeholder list. Always ask, after every conversation“, is there someone else you’d recommend I talk to?” This can help not just unlock doors, but also discover doors you didn’t know existed!

Critical Skills Needed for Project Success – Part 2 Translation

Written by Elizabeth Larson on December 7, 2021. Posted in Articles.

This article is part of a series and presents the second critical skill that all project managers (PMs) and business analysts (BAs) need for success. This one is about the importance of being able to translate technical complexity into business language. As the technology in organizations has become not only increasingly important to its success but also more complex, the need for business stakeholders to understand its true value has increased accordingly. Both PMs and BAs need to talk to their stakeholders about technology, its use, its value, and the results it produces. The language they use has to be about both the technology and the business and be stated in terminology that stakeholders understand.

BAs have always been translators. From the early days of business analysis to the present we have translated business requirements into specifications that could be designed, built, tested, and delivered. But translation has never ended there. We take technical designs and specifications and translate them back to the stakeholders to be sure they understand what they’re actually getting. We have been translators as technologies and methodologies have changed. So being a translator is nothing new. What’s new is that with more complex technologies like AI, the importance of translation is being recognized.

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Years ago I started a new job as a PM. The team was full of technical jargon when they talked to me (OK) and in their discussions with stakeholders (not OK). I encouraged them to translate what they were saying into business language. So instead of talking, for example, about DB14 or problems with Joe’s program abends, I encouraged them to translate these issues into business language–to talk about Price information and how to fix the results caused by program errors. At first there was resistance, but gradually there was a focus on the business and not the technology. I’m not sure the team was entirely bought into a business focus. After all it’s cool to be able to talk techie. But I had several sponsors comment on the positive change.

The fact is, the more complex the technology, the greater the need for us to help stakeholders understand our elicitation questions so that they can make good business decisions and understand the ramifications of their decisions.

OK, so BAs have always been translators. What in it for PMs? We PMs spend lots of time with our sponsors and executives. I know how tempting it is to try to impress them with our technical prowess. We can easily fall into the trap of thinking we’re adding to our credibility by showing how fluent we are in the technical language. But far more impressive is understanding the technical terms and concepts well enough to clearly explain how the technology provides value to the organization.

To be successful translators, we need to understand not only the technology, but the business, including the industry, the organization’s goals and objectives, and the specific business area. But what does “understand” mean? On an AI project, for example, we don’t need to understand the details of model creation, but we do need to know that the algorithms being used further the business objectives. We need to be conversant enough in the technology to formulate our questions as well as answer questions that arise.

3 techniques for effective translation

Visual business models are among the best tools for the translator. Process, data, use case, and prototype models help the technical staff better understand the business requirements. Models abstract detailed information and present it in a way that’s useful to all audiences. Abstraction, of course, is the process of filtering out extraneous information, leaving only the essential details. Most people find models way more useful than requirements written in a lengthy list of “shalls,” which is how we used to document them.

When we translate, we also need confirmation from the business. Visual business models help translate back from the technical to the business stakeholders. The emphasis, of course, is on business models, because we don’t want to hand technical specifications or designs to our stakeholders without translations into business language.

Synthesis. Being able to translate means we need to take in a lot of information at once and almost instantaneously sort through it, discard the extraneous, and present the most important concepts. What helps us is understanding the context of the topic at hand. And we need both business and technical context. This allows us to take disparate facts gotten in previous conversations and put them back together in a framework that helps the business understand what we’re talking about and how they’re going to get value.

Elicitation. In Part 1 I covered elicitation, saying that we ask questions and listen to the responses, and that’s how we learn. There are times during translating when we need elicit information. For example, if we’re providing stakeholders information on AI results based on the algorithm used to create those results, we may want to ask the model creators why that algorithm was used or how it helps the business. Once we have this information, we can be confident that our explanation to the stakeholders is both technically accurate and valuable to the business.

Translation is critical to project success. It’s one of those skills that sounds easy, but which takes knowledge and a mastery of various skills. Translation is part of what distinguishes us from the order-taking BAs and PMs who are less valuable to our organizations.

5 Reasons why you should use Portfoleon to manage your project portfolio

Written by Brad Egeland on December 1, 2021. Posted in Articles.

In my next installment of this “5 Reasons Why…” series on project management related software and services, I want to consider 5 reasons why you should consider Portfoleon to manage your projects and portfolio of projects. I personally had not heard of Portfoleon before, but was delightfully overwhelmed with the power and visibility this tool gives to the project leaders when presenting projects for planning and alignment with organizational goals. The key to getting buy-in from senior management is to demonstrate feasibility, efficiency, and relevance of your plans with these projects and how they align to the strategic company goals. Portfoleon does just that. Let’s consider…

Get a bird’s eye view of the project portfolio

In managing your project portfolio Portfoleon puts emphasis on visualization. Make every conversation you have with your stakeholders productive by instantly pulling the right data from a single source of truth and visualizing it in a way that enables your team to make decisions.

With Portfoleon’s powerful visualization capabilities you can make kanban boards, strategic timelines, spreadsheets, pivot tables, and charts to highlight different aspects and interact with your portfolio. Planning resource demand and supply in broad strokes will enable you to quickly find and address resource gaps.

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Collaborate and involve

You will get better results and improve buy-in when your stakeholders are actively involved in the portfolio management process. Gone are the days when a manager would work on the project plans on their own.

With Portfoleon you can involve others into the process, test assumptions, prepare plan changes, and finally roll the updated plans out to the whole organization.

With a draft-publish-rollback system, your team members will be able to confidently perform experiments and make changes knowing that they will not interfere with the work of others.

Customize to your specific needs

Define your own corporate terminology and data structure with custom item types, fields, forms, and automation rules.

All the custom items and fields are available everywhere – in the spreadsheets, kanban and timeline cards, pivot tables, integration API, and more.

Integrate into your IT landscape

Portfoleon is made to integrate into your IT landscape – securely and efficiently. Use the single sign-on integration to authenticate your users, use the native integration with Jira, or integrate with anything using the integration API or a no-code Zapier connector.

Get quick wins even with the most difficult portfolio

There are many great software systems out there that provide complex portfolio management capabilities, but ask you to go through a long preparation process before you can get started. Often the maintenance effort or barriers to entry become too high and the teams choose to proceed with the old ways.

Portfoleon is designed to help you to start small. With as little as a just list of projects names and two key dates Portfoleon can already provide you with a lot of value. Add more data points gradually to improve your portfolio management system. With every small step involve more stakeholders, have more productive conversations, and get a better outcome.

Start now

Make your project portfolio planning simple, visual, and lightweight in Portfoleon. Get started now with their free plan.