Speakers
Karen McKenderick, D'Arna Doyle and James, IT advisory managers from KPMG Australia
Karen and D'Arna gave a talk about the importance of engaging and managing Stakeholders in the project life cycle. James assisted with the slides, role play exercises and handing out lollies as an incentive for audience participation.
The KPMG organisation
KPMG, a professional services firm, are also one of the worlds top four auditing firms. KPMG have three lines of services, audit, tax and advisory. The advisory services are further divided into Management consulting, Risk Consulting and Transaction and Restructuring. The IT Advisory services provide the following services: ERP Advisory, IT External Audit, IT Protection and Business Resilience, Business Intelligence, IT Project Advisory, IT Internal Audit, IT Strategy & Performance. The presenters were well qualified, having over 20 years project management experience between them.
Stakeholders in Projects
The stakeholders in a project are entities both inside and outside of an organisation that exhibit the following properties: Project sponsorship An interest or gain in the successful completion of a project. Have a positive or negative influence in the project completion.
Stakeholder Engagement in the Project Lifecycle
It is important to determine the stakeholders during the project scoping phase. Once the stakeholders have been identified they need to be engaged so that the project plan addresses all of the requirements of the project from all aspects, not just the project team. When the execution phase of the project begins a continual process of stakeholder management needs to occur. Stakeholder management will ensure that good communication occurs between the project team members and the stakeholders. Requirement changes and identified risk can then be addressed efficiently by all parties helping to ensure successful completion of the project. Identification and Analysis A case study was presented, demonstrating the importance of good stakeholder analysis. Complex relationships between stakeholders need to be identified so that a process to manage the stakeholders can be proposed early on in the project. Not having a good process to manage the stakeholders can impact the project and cause delays.
Determine the Stakeholders
Factors to determine a stakeholder:
Who can influence your project?
Who is making decisions for your project?
Who may be impacted by the project activities or its outcome?
Who will benefit if the project is successful?
Who will benefit if the project is not successful?
Who should be supporting the project?
Information Gathering
When a stakeholder is identified the following attributes need to be gathered. For a large number of stakeholders, a database can aide management of the stakeholders. The stakeholder relation should contain the following tuples:
Stakeholders Relation
StakeHolderID
StakeHolderGroup Business Users, Steering committee, Public, IT management, Business Executive, Vendors
StakeHolderName CEO, CFO,user, manager
Organisation
ContactDetails
Role
ImpactOfChange High/Medium/Low
InfluenceOnChange High/Medium/Low
Current support of change High/Medium/Low
Desired level of support High/Medium/Low
Current Attitude to project Positive/ Indifferent/ Negative
Known issues/concerns Ability to realise benefits, resource concerns, knowledge transfer.
To help the teams understand who the teams respective projects stakeholders are and why those stakeholders should be engaged, a group exercise was conducted. A project was chosen from the group and a project member provided an overview, explaining the scope, objectives. The challenge was to identify the extent of impact and influence of stakeholders. We then discussed how to engage the respective stakeholders. Our discussion was very useful, the example project used help the team members identify stakeholders that they had not yet considered.
I have identified my project stakeholders:
My academic supervisor, Dr Raymond Choo
My Client, UniSA Information Assurance Group & Forensic Computing Lab.
UniSA course co-ordinator, Dr Jing Gao
UniSA course facilitator, Anastasia Govan
UniSA analyst programmer , Shihoko Takahashi
I meet with my project supervisor/client every two weeks and post my project progress on my project blog. This has ensured good communication has occurred throughout the execution of my project. A case study was presented to demonstrate what happens when a stakeholder has not been engaged. A KPMG client found that their business users stakeholder were not happy with the new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. The stakeholder had been involved during the initial requirements stage. Alas, the stakeholder was not engaged during the project execution therefore had had no input into the final product developed.
Understanding Stakeholder Engagement
Understanding and pro-actively connecting to people who have an impact or influence on the success of your project is important, This will ensure they are committed to action.
The following methods can be used for information finding:
Survey the stakeholder. Surveying of the stakeholder can be done easily using on-line forms.
Interviews. Ask permission to record the interviews. The recordings can then be used for analysis and reflection.
Listening groups. The stakeholders and project team members meet regularly to provide input to influence the direction of the project.
Project Newsletter. The project team reports progress to stakeholders via a newsletter which generates feedback.
Social Media. The Stakeholders and the public can provide valuable feedback via social media websites.
Informal Discussion. Phone a stakeholder or meet for a coffee to discuss project progress and issues that have arisen.
As I have engaged with my client by holding regular progress meetings, I think my client will be pleased with my final product. I will also ensure that I identify and engage with all my stakeholders in any future projects that I work on. To learn how to handle difficult stakeholder situations and prepare for stakeholder consolations, a role play exercise was conducted. James played a financial manager who had not been engaged during the planning phase by the project team. The project is to install a new accounting system. The students were asked to play the role of the project manager and propose steps the project manager should take to resolve the situation.
Here is my response:
Apologise to the manager for not engaging them earlier and ensure them that they will be regularly engaged in the rest of the project.
Arrange a meeting with the manager to review the project plan.
Ensure the manager that any feedback provided will be addressed by the project team and the project plan will be put out for re-review.
Stakeholder Management
Effective stakeholder management requires the following:
Regularly updating stakeholder information and plan.
All risk, developments and issues need to be feedback to the stakeholder.
Frequently monitoring effectiveness of engagement actions
A good tip is to continuously ask yourself, 'are they with us?'
At my last client meeting on Thursday, my client was 'still with me', which is encouraging.
Conclusion and Opinion
I enjoyed KPMGs presentation and exercises. The important points I have picked up are:
Stakeholders need to identified and engaged early on in the project planning phase.
It is important to accurately identify all the stakeholders, this requires some thought and resource allocation in the project plan.
It is important to establish trust and good rapport with stakeholders.
Missing an important stakeholder can prove costly to a project.
Stakeholders need to be engaged to provide project feedback throughout the project life cycle.
To achieve regular engagement, the communicational channels need to be set up as soon as possible.
A frequent check should be made on the status of the vital stakeholder relationships throughout the project lifecycle.
A stakeholder management plan is a vital artefact in ensuring the success of the project.
I will now pay far more attention to stakeholder relationships in my workplace and ensure they are maintained.
References
D'Arna Doyle
Week 9 slides 1 How to engage and manage the stakeholders of your project, Karen McKendrick, D’Arna Doyle KPMG
Week 9 Tasks Anastasia Govan
KPMG Australia
5.KPMG in Wikipedia
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