On the subject of the October Featured Paper entitled “Demystifying Stakeholder Analysis in New Product Development”

07 October 2009

Dear Sir,

The featured paper in the October edition of PM World Today by Le Bel and Ali, Demystifying Stakeholder Analysis in New Product Development, covers some useful ground. There are however two important issues I would like to raise.

The first is the simple stakeholder management cycle in the paper’s Figure 7 that uses the five steps from my Stakeholder Circle® methodology. The management cycle contained in the methodology is rather more complex. It is shown below:

The starting point of the cycle is the identification of stakeholders and we recommend that a fresh scan of the project or program environment is undertaken on a regular basis timed to support the routine risk reviews (there is a strong correlations between stakeholders and risk).

After the initial prioritization, there are two inputs to re-prioritization, the current attitude of stakeholders who have been the subject of targeted communication plus any new stakeholders from identification.

The critical omission from Le Bell and Ali’s diagram is the tactical management of the engagement process. Monitoring the effect of each significant communication should occur more or less continually and adjustments made to the engagement strategy as needed to optimize outcomes.

There is extensive publicly available documentation on the Stakeholder Circle® methodology at www.stakeholder-managment.com if your readers are interested in more in-depth information.

The critical omission from the paper though lies in a different direction altogether. Based on feedback from seminar participants and organisations around the world I believe it is almost impossible for a project to effectively manage its stakeholders as a stand alone endeavor. This is one of the reasons why I have temporarily stopped offering my stakeholder management workshops as part of PMI’s SeminarsWorld® program. Effective stakeholder management is not a stand alone ‘project issue’, it’s an organisational issue. Certainly as Le Bel and Ali suggest in their paper, if a project fails to manage its stakeholders, it is planning to fail; the challenge is achieving a mature organisational culture that allows the project team to effectively manage its internal and external stakeholders.

Stakeholder Relationship Management Maturity (SRMM) across the organisation is the key. My new book, Stakeholder Relationship Management: A Maturity Model for Organisational Implementation 1 defines the SRMM® model and offers a pathway for organisations to progress towards a mature and effective stakeholder management environment. Very few stakeholders have only one connection to an organization, and their perceptions and expectations will be colored by the entirety of their experience, not just the one relationship the project team are focused on.

Until organizational maturity is achieved, the only option is for projects to do their best in an ad hoc manner. But collectively, we also need to start pushing senior management to move towards adopting a holistic and mature stakeholder management approach as a significant organizational culture change to gain a real competitive advantage.

Lynda Bourne, CEO
Stakeholder Management Pty Ltd.
Melbourne, Australia

1. Gower Publishing Ltd: http://www.gowerpub.com/isbn/9780566088643

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