Drawn from your experience, if you had to choose only one critical stakeholders engagement contributing factor that you found to be crucial to your project or leadership success, what would it be?
While many important elements are at play, we place 'Establishing a Healthy Rapport' amongst the top crucial factors to consider when engaging for success.
Stakeholders come from various internal departments, external environments and at times from entirely different industries. Their motivation differs depending on their perspective, their perceived gains and feared losses.
In a recent IT project where we assisted a large financial company by leading departmental transformation activities, we encountered a complex stakeholder engagement dilemma.
The program business case was to tailor a technical solution to arising Anti Money Laundering regulatory requirements. The program spanned across dozens of enhancement projects providing technical solutions to new business requirements, alongside defect-fix projects aimed at amending existing code which no longer coincided with the new regulatory outlook.
If you had the opportunity to work in a large organisation encompassing multiple departments, you would have soon enough found that while all departments are making great efforts towards working collaboratively as to achieve the overall organisational goals, they are conflicted by the fact that they each operate in their own autonomous space, with independently allocated budget, employees, systems, goals and department-initiated projects. Its therefore often that organisational goals are being translated differently by the different departments, and while this might appear as an unfavourable scenario, it actually happens quite often with supporting justifications in place.
Each department will have its own perspective on the overall organisational agenda and will have their ideas as to how to contribute to the overall goal within the realm of their business operations. Their ideas, although perfectly valid and critical to promoting the organisational strategy, will not always align with the plans and priorities of the other departments.
So in an environment where inter-departmental resource sharing is imperative to daily operations, how do you deal with competing agendas? how do you gain a willing collaboration from other departments? How do you gain access to their resources or internal knowledge? How do you engage for an outcome of mutual success? After all, for a success to be deemed you must find an outlet for a win-win situation, where all parties equally share in order to equally gain.
The desired end result is of course all departments working together towards aligning their priorities and agendas such that there is no clash in resource allocation and so that integrity in systems modification remains intact. This end result is a goal placed high on the hierarchy of operational checklists, but it's in fact the reality that the actual outcome is far from being perfect.
In reality, departments' priorities and agendas will not always perfectly align and departments often find themselves competing on priorities, resources and funding.
During our lessons-learned analysis we've concluded that building a healthy rapport was one of the instrumental elements to our delivery success, as was the case in most of our projects.
We took the time to analyse our existing and potential stakeholders, mapping their stake in numerous simultaneous projects. We identified who were our proponents and conversely who were our opponents. We learned about their agendas, priorities, their inner and inter departmental goals. By conducting a thorough stakeholder analysis and mapping, we were able to understand their motivation and offer our assistance by sharing resources, exchanging priorities or aligning our timelines.
The reciprocal return showed great appreciation of our mindful efforts to accommodate operational requirements. We were able to transform our relationship from being inherently labelled as competitive to one that fosters collaboration. Our stakeholders' willing collaboration was crucial to our outcome of delivery success. Working together we've made great strides towards achieving inner and inter departmental level success as well as promoting the ultimate organisational strategy.
Our lessons learned reports from various projects indeed conclude that stakeholder engagement was crucial to project success, whether it be in small, medium or large environments. Building stakeholders' rapport promoted mutual understanding and provided the project leadership team with the assurance that the relationship is on track and is likely to strengthen rather than dissipate. It sends the clear message that you can empathise with your stakeholder's attitude towards your projects, allowing you to elevate their gains and minimise the losses, and consequently resulting in mutually beneficial deliveries.
Establishing a healthy rapport and positioning yourselves as contributing collaborators is key to any venture success.
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