In 40 plus years in the system development business, delivering solutions and managing business and technology change, I’ve discovered that there are three key ingredients for success. That’s right, just three - an effective stakeholder group, defined and proven processes, and a decision framework - a mechanism for quickly leveraging industry best practices (I call them decision areas). My conviction is based on this premise: If the stakeholders for a given change are actively involved in and agree with each decision, and all the vital decisions are addressed, the project will be successful.
Project Pre-Check Building Blocks
In this series of articles, we’ll use the Project Pre-Check practice to example real world projects and the performance of the stakeholders involved.
The first project we’ll look at is an unfortunate example of what can happen when the stakeholders don’t step up to the plate. Unfortunately, it grew from a $7 million initiative to more than $30 million with no end in sight. That’s why I call this post The Never Ending Project!
Stakeholders
Having the right stakeholders engaged in and committed to a project is absolutely fundamental to project success. So, what are stakeholders? They are the influencers and decision makers. Project Pre-Check includes four roles: sponsor, change agent, target and champion.
Stakeholder Roles
A Sponsor is a manager who legitimizes the planned change, has the economic, logistical or political power to make the change happen and is ultimately responsible for decisions relating to the five W’s (who, when, what, where, why).
A Change Agent – typically, but not necessarily, a project director or manager - is responsible to the sponsor(s) for implementing the change. Authority is focused on determining how to deliver according to the sponsors' mandate and targets’ needs.
A Target is a manager who directs individuals or groups who must actually change the way they think and work for a change to be successful. Targets include managers of departments within the initiating organization but can also include managers who are external to the organization initiating the change, such as customers, vendors, partners and distributors.
A Champion is a manager or senior staff member who enthusiastically supports the planned change and has the power, influence and respect necessary to help bring about the necessary behavioral changes in the managers and staff that are affected by the change.
All of these roles need to be filled, not just the sponsor and change agent. And every individual identified as a stakeholder needs to be actively involved and engaged from project inception through completion.
So let’s look at how the right stakeholder involvement can make or break a planned change.
The Situation
This organization provides credit life insurance coverage for financial services companies and their customers. Antiquated business processes and technology restricted their ability to respond to their clients’ demands for better products, new services and better integration of the sales and administrative processes to reduce costs and improve responsiveness.
The Goal
To upgrade technology and redesign business processes to enable improved product and service offerings and better integration with their clients’ operations. The plan was to leave the interfaces to existing client services intact to reduce costs and risk. Expected cost was $7 million.
The Project
The organization had a small IT organization and experience with small projects. They were able to acquire an experienced project manager from the parent company and selected third party software to administer the life insurance contracts. A business executive was the project’s sponsor.
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