Ihab Saad – Stakeholder Management
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AI: Transcript ©
Music, hello and welcome to another lecture in construction
management, 422, and today we're going to be talking about
stakeholder management. So we're going to introduce who the
stakeholders are and how to manage them. What are the different
requirements for their management?
So in a brief definition, project stakeholders are individuals or
organizations actively involved with the project. They have to
have some stake in the project, or interest in the project.
They make decisions affecting its performance. So they're going to
be either affecting or they might be affected by the project.
Their interests may be affected as a result of a project execution or
completion. So some stakeholders might be interested in the
project, they want the project to be achieved, and some are going to
be opposed to the project. They want to stop the project as much
as they can.
Stakeholders requirements may be implicit, not explicitly stated,
so you might have to do some work to understand what exactly do
these stakeholders want from the project. And stakeholders may have
conflicting interests and objectives, which makes managing
them not an easy task. So we're going to look at the tool that's
called the power interest chart. Assume, for example, that you have
two stakeholders, one who wants the project to be done and one who
wants to stop the project. Both of them have a certain weight. How to
balance that weight? Of course, as you can see, their interests are
opposed. So you cannot achieve the two objectives at the same time,
the two opposing objectives at the same time. Therefore, we have to
prioritize these stakeholders and see which one are we going to take
take care of first,
some sample stakeholders, as it appears on the screen here,
include, of course, anyone who's involved with the project at
different layers and different levels of importance. So you have
the project team, you have the project manager, of course, that's
the main stakeholders, the project sponsor, the client or the owner,
the one who authorized that project, the project management
team that's going to be managing the project with the project
manager. So and then we have a wider circle on the outside that
has project stakeholders. These may even include the public at
large. So for example, if you're going to build a sewage treatment
plant,
whoever is going to be living downwind from the sewage treatment
plant is going to be negatively affected. Anyone who living upwind
from the sewage treatment plant, they're not going to get the
smell. They actually welcome the construction of the sewage
treatment plant, because it's going to take care of the sewage
problem. Therefore, some stakeholders are going to be even
within the public. Some stakeholders are going to be
affected positively, and some are going to be affected negatively.
So to manage stakeholders, we have basically four different tasks, or
four different steps. The first one, we need to identify the
stakeholders without knowing who they are. We're not going to be
able to manage them. And then the second step, once we identify
them, is going to be to plan the stakeholder management. How are we
going to deal with these different stakeholders? The third step is
going to be to manage the stakeholder engagement. How are we
going to communicate with them? What kind of message, how frequent
that message is going to be? And then finally, controlled
stakeholder engagement based on the feedback that we get from
managing them.
So the stakeholder management plan is a document which is a component
of the project management plan, defining the management strategies
to actively and effectively engage in stakeholders. This plan can
either be formal or informal, highly detailed or broadly framed
based on the needs of the project and how complex the project is,
starting with the stakeholder management plan, some of the
components of the plan would address the desired and current
engagement levels of the stakeholders. So sometimes you
have a stakeholder engaged at a certain level, you want to
increase that engagement, or you want to decrease that engagement.
Scope and impact of the change to the stakeholders. How is that
project going to affect the stakeholders? Identified
interrelationships and potential overlap between stakeholders, if
you can group them into a group of supporters, a group of neutrals.
If you a group of adversaries, it's going to be easier to manage
the message to these different groups,
information to be distributed to stakeholders. If you have a
stakeholder who have very limited interest in the project, you don't
want to bombard them with the.
With positive message. They don't know about the project, but if we
excite them about the project, they may be supporters resistant,
which is opposite to that could be gained through better information
and concessions. We are going to do this for you in order to
support the project. If you remember, if you have taken the
324 class with me, if you remember, we had a video called
skyscraper, and the skyscraper, basically there was a developer
who wanted to build a skyscraper in downtown Manhattan, and it was
close to an area that was called Clinton or *'s Kitchen, which
was a blue collar, middle class environment or neighborhood, and
some of the residents of that neighborhood were against the
construction of this high rise building that's going to be quite
expensive, and it might affect the value of their property and so on.
So as a concession, the developer promised that He is going to
upgrade their apartments within a certain perimeter around the
building. He's going to upgrade their apartment. He put them in
hotels until these apartments were upgraded. This is the big
concession. So basically, if you're going to upgrade my
apartment for free, I'm definitely going to be a supporter for your
project.
If they're neutral, keep them informed. If they're not gonna
move to support the project, at least keep them informed about the
development on the project. If they're supporting, give them an
active advocate role, not only to be verbally supported supportive,
but we want them to be actually supportive of the project through
actions. And finally, if they are leading, make them actively
involved to promote the project agenda. You want to gain them on
your side.
So again, we can another way of classifying these stakeholders.
We're going to list their names, and here are the five different
classifications, unaware, resistant, neutral, supportive and
leading. We can write down what is the current status with the letter
C, and then what is the desired status with the letter D. So for
example, for stakeholder Number one, he or she was unaware of the
project, we want them to be supportive of the project.
Therefore, what kind of actions are we going to do to move them
from one column to another? You definitely do not want to move a
neutral to resistant, or you don't want to move anyone in the
resistance. So you have to take care of your actions to make sure
that no one becomes resistant as a
reaction to an action that you have performed.
Another analytic tool, which is the power interest chart, and that
enables us to recognize, initially, where are the
stakeholders, and then gradually move them within that matrix as
much as we can. So on the horizontal axis, we have the
interest, which can be actually, it can be broken down into five or
10 different grades. Right now we have three different grades, low,
medium or high.
And then when it comes to the power, we also have on the
vertical axis, low, medium and high.
If you have someone with low interest and low power, you don't
have to do much effort with them. All you have to do is just monitor
them. So that's going to be a minimum effort.
On the other hand, if we have someone with high interest but low
power, just keep them informed, make them feel as if they are part
of the project.
If we have someone with low interest but high power keep them
satisfied.
But finally, if we have someone who has high power and high
interest, these are the key stakeholders. This is the group A
that we have identified in the first table, and you have to
manage them closely to make sure that you are moving them 45
degrees to the northeast to maximize their their interest and
their power and the road for the project.
Other classification techniques would include something very
similar to the power interest chart that's called Power
influence grid. Another one is the influence impact grid, another
derivation of that grid as well. And the last one is called a
salience model, which is a little bit more detailed, which is a
three dimension analysis, focusing on the stakeholders, power or
ability to impact the project. That's one dimension, their
urgency or need for immediate attention, that's a second
dimension. And finally, their legitimacy of their demands,
that's the third dimension. So based on the salience model, it's
going to look something like this.
So we have the three intersecting.
Online. Whoever is interested, they might be able to to download
it or to view it. Project reports, including lessons learned, issues,
log, risk breakdown, structure and project closure reports. These are
documents that have to be included in your project closeout report at
the end project presentations from time to time, through progress,
meetings, for example, or stakeholders meeting, you're going
to have to present the status of the project. This is how we
started. This is where we are right now. These are the
challenges. These are the issues that we have to deal with, and
these are our solutions, etc. Project records. You have to keep
documentation, the paper trade of these records, because you might
need them in the future, and most importantly, feedback from
stakeholders, because for a new project, you're going to use this
as lessons learned from the previous projects.
And that's basically our presentation about stakeholder
management.
I hope our class discussion is going to elaborate on that even
more. And if you have any questions, I'll be glad to answer
these.