Microsoft Project 2013: The Missing Manual

Gaining Support for a Project

Sponsorship is important during the selection process, but support becomes crucial once projects start up. Projects rarely finish without running into some kind of trouble, and you often need help digging them out. Alas, many people lend a hand only if there’s something in it for them, which is why identifying the people who care about a project (the stakeholders) is so important.

Stakeholders can play a part in projects from proposal to the final closeout. During the planning phase, stakeholders help define the project and evaluate the project plan. A few lucky stakeholders then cough up the money to fund the project. During the execution phase, stakeholders help resolve problems and make decisions about changes, risk strategies, and (if necessary) whether to fork over more money. At the end of a project, some of the stakeholders get to declare the project complete so everyone can move on to another project.

Identify Who Has a Stake in the Project

Commitment comes from all levels of an organization, from the executive-level project sponsor to the people who work on the project every day. Project stakeholders get their name because they have a stake in the project’s outcome. They either give something to your project—like the managers who provide the resources you use—or they want something from it, like the sponsors who support your fundraiser in exchange for publicity. (If your stakeholders aren’t providing the support you expect, read the box on When Stakeholders Aren’t Supportive for ways to get them on board.)

Identifying stakeholders can be tough. Some people don’t realize they’re stakeholders, like the development team that learns about a project when they receive a list of requirements for a new website. Other people pretend to be stakeholders but aren’t, like a department that gets chummy because they see your project as an inexpensive way to get their new database. If you’re not careful, your project can gain extraneous requirements but no additional money.

Here are the main types of stakeholders, tips for identifying them, and some hints on keeping them happy:

• Project customers are easy to spot, because they’re the ones with the checkbooks. Pleasing the stakeholders who fund your project is a matter of delivering the results they expect (Identifying Project Results). Stay on top of financial performance (Using Project Cost Reports) so you can explain financial shortfalls and your plan to get back on track. The people who control the pocketbook can be formidable allies if other groups are trying to expand the project.

  Because customers foot the bill, they usually have a lot to say about the project’s objectives, requirements, and deliverables. Of course, the person who cuts the check isn’t often the person who defines requirements, but they both represent the project’s customer. (For instance, with a fundraising event, the customer sets the fundraising goal and the event budget, while the event director defines the event’s features.) Customers also approve documents, intermediate results, and the final outcome. Approvals are much easier to come by if you work closely with customers during planning to identify their objectives and what they consider success.

  Note

  When you manage a project that produces a product to sell, you don’t interact with the final customers—the ones who buy the product. Instead, you work with intermediaries like sales reps, marketing departments, and focus groups.

• Project sponsors are the folks who want the project to succeed and have the authority to make things happen, like the regional director who’s backing the fundraising project. If you, the project manager, don’t have that kind of authority, you may depend on sponsors to confer some of their authority to you. A sponsor’s role is to support the project manager and the project team to make the project a success. After guiding a project through the selection process, the sponsor’s next task is to sign and distribute a project charter (Publicizing a Project and Its Manager), which publicizes the new project and your authority as the project manager.

  A sponsor can help you prioritize objectives, tell you which performance measures are critical, and guide you through the rapids of organizational politics. She can also recommend ways to build commitment or fix problems. Sometimes, project sponsors are also project customers, whether for internal projects or for those that deliver products to external customers.

  If you don’t have enough authority to make a crucial call or the project hits serious obstacles, the sponsor can step in. While sponsors want their projects to succeed, they expect you to manage the project. Dropping problems at their doorstep every few minutes won’t win their hearts, but neither will hiding problems until it’s too late. If you need help, don’t be afraid to get your sponsor involved.

• Functional managers (also called line managers) run departments like marketing, finance, and IT. They have quotas and performance measures to meet in addition to supervising the resources in their departments. Project resources almost always come from these departments, so you have to learn to work with these folks.

  The easiest way to win over functional managers is to let them do their jobs. Don’t tell them who you need (unless you already have a great working relationship). Instead, specify the skills you need and the constraints you face, like cost, availability, or experience. Then, after the managers provide you with resources, do your best to stick to the assignment dates you requested. When schedules slip, notify functional managers quickly so you can work out an alternative.

  Tip

  Functional managers spend time listening to employees complain about being overworked, overwhelmed, or bored. So if you can demonstrate why you need the resources you request, when you need them, and that the schedule is feasible, managers are more likely to commit their people.

• Team members who do project work are stakeholders, too, because they perform the tasks that make up the project. Other types of stakeholders often do double duty as team members, like when a customer defines requirements.

  Keeping team members happy requires a combination of a reasonable workload, meaningful work, and a pleasant work environment. Communication is as important with team members as it is with every other type of stakeholder: Team members want to know how their tasks support the big picture, what their tasks represent, and when they’re scheduled to perform them.

• You already know that project managers are stakeholders, because your reputation and livelihood depend on the success of your projects. The project manager is easy to identify when it’s you. How to make yourself happy is something you have to figure out on your own.

• End users of the project result are also stakeholders. For example, a project to streamline your organization’s business processes will affect the employees, so you should include a representative from the department or role that’s affected.

  If your project’s goal is a new product for your company to sell, it’s too early to assign stakeholder status to the customers who will purchase the product. In this situation, you might include a small group of potential customers to provide feedback on your plan.

The process of building a project plan (Project Planning in a Nutshell) helps you identify stakeholders. For instance, the purpose of the project and who benefits from it tell you who the customer and sponsor are. Project objectives help you identify which groups participate in achieving those objectives. The responsibility matrix (Identifying Project Resources) identifies the groups involved in a project and their level of involvement, so it acts as a checklist of stakeholder groups. Of course, you still have to identify the specific people to work with within those groups. When you start to build your project team, the list of functional managers and team members falls into place.

REALITY CHECK: When Stakeholders Aren’t Supportive

Some projects are good for the organization as a whole but cause problems for a few stakeholders. For example, a process-improvement project may save your company tons of money but spell layoffs for one group. Unsupportive stakeholders can actively undermine your project by doing things like withholding resources or raising issue after issue.

Project management isn’t as ruthless as a career in organized crime, but Michael Corleone provided sound advice for winning over stakeholders in the movie The Godfather Part II: “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.” Find out what stakeholders’ issues are, and you may find ways to appease them.

Sometimes, the project sponsor or other stakeholders can help you bring reluctant stakeholders onboard. But politics and relationships that outlast your project often leave you to muddle through on your own. If winning people over is out of the question, be sure to identify the risks that this logjam raises. Then you can communicate those risks and potential workarounds to all the stakeholders and let them decide what to do. Still, the outcome isn’t always a success, and the conflicts may permanently damage your project.

Documenting Stakeholders

As projects pick up momentum, their details quickly become too numerous for you to remember them all. Stakeholders are so important to projects that you can’t afford to forget them. As you identify stakeholders during planning, create a stakeholder analysis table. Merely listing names and types of stakeholders in this table isn’t enough. Also include information about people’s roles, which objectives matter most to them, and whom they listen to.

Figure 1-5 shows a sample stakeholder analysis table, which you can download from this book’s Missing CD page at www.missingmanuals.com/cds. Look for the Word file Ch01_Stakeholder_Analysis.doc.

Figure 1-5. When you’re working with a table in a Word document, you can add a new row to the table by pressing Tab when you’re done typing in the last cell of a row. To add an additional objective or contribution to a cell, put the insertion point at the end of the cell’s text and then press Enter.

Here’s some info that’s helpful to collect about each stakeholder:

• Organization or department. Knowing where a stakeholder works helps you remember the objectives they care about, and helps you decide whether they should participate in different activities. For instance, if your company wants to keep strategy sessions confidential, you don’t want to invite external stakeholders to them.

• Objectives. List the objectives that each stakeholder cares about—from her hottest button to her coolest. If you need help rallying stakeholders around an objective, this info helps you find allies.

• Contributions. List what the stakeholder does for the project. Contributions you list here are different from the responsibilities you put in a responsibility matrix (Creating a Responsibility Matrix in Excel). In the stakeholder table, you specify the contributions that individuals make to the project in their roles as stakeholders.

• Advisors. The people to whom stakeholders listen are great sources for tips on presenting information effectively and deciding which options a stakeholder might prefer.