Having an Eye on the Stakeholders

The BriscoBikes Holding comprises a broad range of different staff members: managers and employees, various roles such as accountants, salesmen, fitters, designers and HR experts, or blue collar and, white collar workers. These groups differ in how they currently use IT systems. Some staff spend most of their working day behind their computers, while others only occasionally use an IT terminal for administrative tasks.

The 4S project will impact these different groups in different ways. While some only experience minor changes, others must get used to both an entirely new IT system and user interface as well as new workflows. Change management activities should consider these differences and address the respective groups with activities meeting their specific requirements.

Identifying and clustering employees to groups is a goal of the stakeholder identification. This step also helps to answer the following important questions: How many employees will be impacted by the cloud implementation? Where are these employees located? What are the important characteristics of these groups?

Besides the group level, the stakeholder identification also targets the individual level, striving to find out which members of the organization are specifically relevant for the project success. These are usually top managers, IT leaders, and leaders of large business units impacted by the cloud implementation.

As an internal marketing and communication expert at THE URBAN CYCLIST, Paul knows the company well. Therefore, Sandra and he start the stakeholder identification with this subsidiary. Paul has already contacted the HR department and collected information on the number of employees per unit. The IT department has also delivered information about the number of current users of legacy systems being replaced by the new cloud solution.

The following chart shows an overview of THE URBAN CYCLIST’s organizational structure, and the information that Paul already gathered.

Paul decides to use the monthly meeting Bart de Vries has scheduled with him in order to have an exchange on the 4S project for collecting the missing information for his stakeholder identification.

Let’s listen to their conversation.

After the call with Bart de Vries, Paul starts structuring the gathered stakeholder information in a table. Let’s help him to document the insights for the Finance and Production units of THE URBAN CYCLIST.

Take five minutes to complete exercise 12 in your workbook.

In the following video, Sandra and Paul talk about the first stakeholder identification results for THE URBAN CYCLIST.

After identifying all relevant individual stakeholders and stakeholder groups, the next step for Sandra and Paul is to conduct a stakeholder analysis. The stakeholder analysis helps to get an overview of the attitude of stakeholders toward the 4S project and their influence on the project success.

This allows to identify potential risks, for example lacking commitment, or resistance at an early stage. Thus, mitigation activities can be derived and executed timely. These activities then must be tracked, evaluated, and updated in an ongoing stakeholder engagement process.

Sandra and Paul have scheduled a workshop with the three project managers, Lucy, Ron, and Carlos. Together, they talk about their impressions of the key stakeholders documented during the stakeholder identification. The goal of the discussion is to position every stakeholder in a matrix.

The two dimensions of the matrix are the attitude of the respective stakeholder towards the 4S project (from negative to positive) and the influence on the project success (from low to high). As visualized in the chart below, this results in four different stakeholder categories: Promoters, opponents, supporters, and skeptics.

Based on the stakeholder landscape overview, the workshop participants then decide on activities on how to manage the different stakeholders, depending on their current position in the matrix.

You already know some of the key stakeholders of the 4S project. So, it’s up to you to conduct a stakeholder analysis – and to think about strategies to manage different stakeholder types.

Take 15 minutes to complete exercise 13 in your workbook.

After completing the stakeholder analysis workshop, Sandra and Paul discuss their impressions and learning in a wrap-up call.

For information on specific stakeholder engagement activities, have a look at the chart below.

After analyzing all identified individual stakeholders, Sandra and Paul also conduct an analysis of the relevant stakeholder groups (for example, controllers and IT experts). The approach is similar to the one on individual level: Information on the respective stakeholder groups regarding their attitude towards the 4S project and the influence of the group on the project success is collected and documented.

It is helpful to also add additional information, for example, on preferred communication channels or special characteristics. This information is the prerequisite for defining appropriate change management activities, for example, a tailor-fit project communication, meeting the requirements of the specific groups.