1.4 Stakeholder Analysis

We are going to talk about a stakeholder analysis. So we’ve laid out our project charter, we’ve put together a scope statement and again, the project charter and the scope statement will be expanded and we will put a lot more information in there as we move through the project and gain more information to put into those two areas. But one of the things, key to all this, is going to be the stakeholders and we need to analyze these. So stakeholder analyses is a technique to systematically gather and analyze information about our stakeholders. What does it start to look like? Well we’re gonna look again at our example. Now we’re going to talk about specifically one of the stakeholders here. We’re going to take a look at Stakeholder Analysis Matrix. For some reason, when PMI came out with their new edition of PMBOK, they got rid of this chart. This chart is still explained in the new version of the Project Management Body of Knowledge, but the chart actually isn’t in there anymore. So this is a reference from a previous version. Let’s take a look at an example on our Stakeholder Analysis Matrix here. We’re going to talk about the homeowners along the streets that come into the stadium. Why are they listed on here? They’re listed on here because they are definitely going to be affected by this project. Traffic is going to be affected to the point that it’s slower or sometimes they won’t even be able to get in and out of their places because the traffic is so heavy, there’s no way for them to get in and out. We don’t want these people to be inconvenienced too much. We don’t want them to be too bothered by people and cars all along the way. But if they live by the stadium, they’re gonna have some stadium noise. That, we’re gonna try and keep the inconvenience to a minimum. Do these people have a high interest, low interest, high level of power, low level of power, on this project? This little box that we have out here, every stakeholder will have a mark in one quadrant in this box, not every quadrant. Where will these people be? We’ll say you know, they might have high interest, yes they do. Definitely high interest. And as a group, they probably have pretty high power. They can put a lot of pressure on the University, a lot of pressure on the city. They can, if they come together as one group, they can have a big say in what goes on around here with traffic in and out of the stadium. How are we going to work with these people? There’s a number of things that we can do with these people. So, one of them, we can just involve them; get their input all along the way. Another thing we can do, address any kind of concerns they have at all. We’re going to give them regular status reports along the way. One thing that some universities do, one some towns do, say well, you know, why don’t you go ahead and we’ll just allow you to park cars in your yard on game days, so people can make a little bit of extra spending cash on game days. Another thing that some places have done is they said okay every game. Everyone within a certain radius of the stadium, we’ll give you two complimentary tickets for every single game. There’s a number of different ways we can start to work with this group of stakeholders. What we’re trying to do is figure out who are the stakeholders, who are the key stakeholders we have to really work with, anybody who has high power we have to work with. Anybody who has high power and high interest would really have to work with and other stakeholders we have to work with all along the way. But if we have some that are real low power and low interest, they don’t really much care about this and the power of this project, we’ll probably wouldn’t have to work with them very much. They might not really be on our list of stakeholders that we’re dealing with on a regular basis throughout the project. Who are the stakeholders? Why are they on the stakeholder list? What’s their power interest level and how do we work with them? If we put this list together, we can keep ourselves as project managers out of a lot of trouble. You forget some of your key stakeholders along the way in the middle of a project, all of the sudden they surprise and you’ve got some problems on your hand. Let’s get this analyzed up front to be ready for things that come along. Let’s add another stakeholder, the University President. On a sheet of paper, write down why you think the University President is interested in this thing, their level of power and interest, high or low for each one of those. And how would you work with the University President along the way? Here’s what we might have come up with, University President and a couple of reasons that they’re interested in this, definitely high power and high interest. And we’re going to work with them in a number of ways. One of the things, they’re gonna want constant information. We may be able to meet with them face to face but probably not. They may never want to see your smiling face at all. They don’t want to see that. All they want is the Friday status report on this project just to know how things are going. They don’t want to know what you look like, they just want to know what’s going on with the project. So we just figure out, do we have to meet with them? Could we just provide a status report? Could we meet with somebody from their staff? How are we going to work with the University President? We’ll need to get some information from the President or the President’s office and we will need to give them information along the way. So how will we do that? We have, session one is finishing up. Now we’re going to do session two, three, and four. So thank you, and see you back here again soon.