Bob Newman of Insight Consulting (pictured below) has benchmarked data from over 1,000 in-depth stakeholder interviews across 250 organisations worldwide. Together with Donnie MacNicol at Team Animation, he highlights what is really important to stakeholders and what project management organisations should focus on if they want to strengthen their brand.

1. 30
Stakeholder Management
NEVER HAS it been more important to understand
and strengthen the relationship between a project
and its key stakeholders, including the project
sponsors, SROs and the Board. Project managers,
as owners of these key relationships, must therefore
seek to develop their own skills and to understand
what makes the difference in this world of
subjectivity and complexity.
For the last 10 years, working mainly in IT and
Telecomms, we have conducted reviews with project
stakeholders for organisations whose main business
is to manage and deliver projects, including billion
pound business change programmes. We have
carried out face to face reviews with over 1,000 key
project stakeholders within over 250 organisations
across a variety of market sectors. This exceptional
knowledge base has been married with expertise in
developing project management leadership, to offer
insights to both stakeholders and project managers.
The stakeholder reviews are carried out through
informal but structured interviews, covering a
wide variety of aspects of project performance
from a key stakeholder perspective including
how the project is conducted, the competence,
attitudes and behaviours of the project team and
the reliability and predictability of delivery.
Each of these performance areas was discussed
in-depth with the stakeholder, with a view to
understanding their perceptions from a personal
and professional perspective. The discussion also
provides associated metrics related to stakeholder
confidence.
Out of this work came six key recommendations
for project managers:
An analysis of the data for business sponsors and client
project managers indicates that both groups regard the
delivery aspects as their top priority. This should be no
surprise, but what is more significant is they also rated all
the other performance areas as almost equally important.
We believe that project sponsors and leaders should
adopt this kind of broader model of project success
criteria, to both challenge and support project managers
in leading projects towards achieving success from a key
stakeholder perspective.
Stakeholder perceptions are influenced by a range
of factors. The one certainty is that stakeholders’
perspectives and priorities will change over time, and
through successive project phases, and therefore it is
dangerous to assume that yesterday’s assumptions are
still valid. Managing all this subjectivity and complexity
is a significant activity that needs to be encouraged
and supported by project sponsors and projects
organisations. Projects need to be equipped to address it,
in terms of resources, budget and new skills.
For each performance area, there are aspects that
normally make the positive difference from a stakeholder
perspective.An analysis of the highest and lowest
performing relationships in the performance area of
‘Attitudes and Behaviours’of the project team, identifies
the positive factors that made the most difference in the
highest performing relationships – the‘Differentiators’,
and also the negative factors and criticisms that are
mentioned most often in the lowest performing
relationships, the‘Detractors’. The most important
Differentiators in this case are client focus and empathy,
good project communications and being trusted and
reliable.
The analysis across all eight Performance Areas supports
our personal conviction that the most significant overall
Differentiator is the depth of understanding of the
client shown by the project team, including business
drivers and pressures, capabilities, culture and values,
key people and power bases, politics and so on. This
drives stakeholder confidence in benefit realisation,
and in innovation and creativity, as well as overall
confidence in project success. It also provides
the foundation for project managers to
STAKING
A CLAIM
of Insight Consulting (pictured below) has
benchmarked data from over 1,000 in-depth stakeholder
interviews across 250 organisations worldwide.
Together with Donnie MacNicol at Team Animation, he highlights
what is really important to stakeholders and what project
management organisations should focus on if they want to
strengthen their brand.

2. The voice of project management 31March 2009
Stakeholder Management
identify opportunities for additional benefit realisation and value creation –
for leveraging the investment being made in the project.
They need to be provided with the kind of broad and rich structured
framework for evaluating stakeholder relationships and perspectives, and
their confidence in project success, described above. Supporting project
managers with the information from independent stakeholder reviews
can also provide comparisons with global best practice plus an ongoing
analysis of stakeholder expectations and priorities and of associated action/
improvement opportunities. Project budgets should include an allowance
for this.
Project managers need to develop as leaders in order to manage
subjectivity and complexity. An effective relationship with stakeholders,
underpinned by an understanding of stakeholder perspectives and
priorities, is key to this. This is particularly important for project
managers working in organisations whose products are their projects.
The project manager will not be part of the client’s organisation and
will have little or no direct authority. Also, project managers may have to
‘coach’ the sponsors and key stakeholders in how they can best support
the project, e.g. by linking to a mutual understanding of the project
vision.
Effective stakeholder relationships are also key to working out and
implementing strategies for handling the inevitable resistance to change
associated with the project. This reinforces our belief that the emphasis of
investment in project management development should be changed to be
more towards leadership skills.
In summary, key stakeholder perspectives, priorities, concerns and
expectations depend on many things, which will frequently conflict and
will change over time. All of this requires a new emphasis in project
management, involving new skills, new information and new tools, and
also some changes in the emphasis of associated investment.
in the area of improving stakeholder relationships. Donnie MacNicol is director of
Team Animation, a consultancy specialising in developing project management
leadership. He is chair of the People Specific Interest Group, member of the APM
Policy Unit and member of Acumen7.
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The voice of project management
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