Stakeholders – a key piece of the digital project management jigsaw

Paying attention to stakeholder influence has become more and more important in defining the success of projects. Even if the project comes in on time and within budget, if the stakeholders are not happy, then the project hasn’t succeeded.

Katharine Thornber states this when she identifies Stakeholder identification and analysis as her second overlooked task in project management in Project Neglect: Four Overlooked Tasks for Starting Projects (27.2.14).

Let’s go back to basics. Who are ‘stakeholders’? They are any people that can influence the outcome of your project. So this can include internal as well as external people. There’s the rub. It’s hard enough getting your diverse and maybe dispersed, cross-functional team focused in one direction; but several divergent yet powerful client-facing perspectives affecting your direction, now that’s the reality of digital project management.

Many digital jobs - from marketing related, account management and project management - now demand being able to manage stakeholders. However, it’s very hard to find any helpful information on what this means in a digital environment. Classic stakeholder management has been around and analysed for many years. There are processes and tools that are recognised to help. We cover the power grid, RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed) charting and Communication chart in our book with several updates in this blog.

It’s good to see a process in action though and Melanie Frank learns some basics from one of her students in Agile Coach learns from Coachee (3.3.14). Yes, even Agile can learn from older techniques! Melanie describes five stages of stakeholder management analysis affecting a project as demonstrated by her student;

1. Visual representation of the challenges.
2. Stakeholder mapping.
3. Analyse each stakeholder requirement.
4. Summarise core asset of success criteria.
5. Define core areas for improvement.

The link between identifying and analysing digital stakeholders with marketing and project management is well served in a recent PhD thesis by Steven Boyer, Glasgow Uni. Steven investigates the digital games industry. He defines his second and third stage of investigation as looking at the influence of institutional stakeholders and the way in which they analyse data about the audience (he prefers ‘player’ as a term for the reasons he gives) relating to the images in games, and the power-play within institutions that then influences the production of images in new games. This is the closest we got to a definition of how important an influence stakeholders can exert on digital projects. Congrats on the doctorate, Steven. Playermaking: the institutional production of digital game players, February 2014. Yes, it is necessarily written in a very academic and rhetorical style but we hope you can gleam the nuggets.

Overall, the environment in which we are operating is changing: no surprises there. What this means is that the business public and the way they are improving - in what is called ‘digital literacy’ - is becoming a factor we can’t ignore. The general public are changing their digital literacy too. This concept is one that needs to be watched and analysed as it affects how people relate to our products/projects. There’s a definition of ‘digital literacy’ and more at JISC – well, Northumbria Uni on behalf of JISC - that sums it all up in plain English. Honest, we didn’t aim to plug some universities over others!

Thoughts on the RACI Matrix project management technique

The RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) matrix is accepted as a best practice tool for management especially in projects. Establishing the matrix is a process at the beginning of a project for the Project Manager. It identifies the people involved with project over different stages, their level of involvement and decision-making.

By using a RACI matrix, as we’ve seen in past blogs, the project manager identifies who, how and how often he/she needs to communicate with the key people who have the power to influence the project. But through its creation, the project manager locks down the people who control the various development stages of the project by defining them and getting them to agree to their responsibility/accountability. This makes the PM’s role clearer. We all recognise terror striking when the person you’ve been dealing with says, ‘I just have to show this to X’. This is what RACI tries to avoid. You deal with the key person at the right times to help smooth decisions in the project.

Sounds convincing, and it has been. That’s why it’s a best practice tool. However, as with all tools, it depends how it is used. Some have found it hard to establish roles and responsibilities when they have not been clearly defined in an organisation prior to the PM asking. The ‘golden’ rule is that there must only be one person accountable for each stage otherwise you can’t get sign-off efficiently. (See Management Study Guide for a list of rules for use, and, David Morris’ blog (6th April 2009) for several more rules and his use of the tool under Agile development processes).

To help when there seems to be too many people without clear responsibilities, some have included ‘S’ for ‘support’ as a role and turned RACI into RASCI. This is explained in IT Toolbox.

We all need to try and streamline our processes to be more efficient and Simplicity recently posted an article from The European Business Review on improving a company’s performance by simplifying organisational structures.

This advocates ‘getting radical’ with RACI matricies so that they are only used at key points, not for everything. We certainly understand the over-complex organisation, the over-involvement of some people in decision-making, the problems a large organisation has making fast decisions and this call here for radicalism in this context. But we’d argue that iMedia projects are serving to move these organisations forward and should be considered key projects since any indecision over any stage of development increases time and cost factors for the organisation. We should point out that RACI in this article is interpreted as Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Involved – yet another variation. It isn’t explained here though.

Do you treat large, medium and small clients differently? If so, in what ways?

RACI Matrix benefits revisited

The RACI Matrix is the tool you can use to map the stakeholders in your projects to recognise their needs for communication and decision-making against the listing of tasks that the project has to address. We covered it in our book Chapter 4, Stakeholders and their influence.

Remember what this acronym stands for? Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed. There has always been some confusion about the difference between Responsible and Accountable but this should now become easier if you apply the adage the buck stops here to Accountable. Responsible means the doer, the person or people who carry out the task. So the ranking RACI is not hierarchical as the person accountable often lies higher up the management chain.

Why use RACI? It is a well recognised tool in general project management processes now and it will help your professionalism as well as your credibility if your clients already employ the tool in their own companies. But beyond that, it has many tangible benefits for iMedia project management.

• You can use it to assess the workload needed in your own team and across the client's involvement.
• It will help you identify if you have enough manpower for each task and whether the client has recognised who and when should be involved for their side of the project to run smoothly and successfully. There’s nothing worse than hanging around waiting for input from the client, is there?
• Then, although we don’t like admitting it, both ourselves and the client have staff turnover. So if and when this happens, you can quickly establish the roles and responsibilities of new staff in your project if they are taking over from someone you have identified in the RACI process.
• Work assignment can get knocked sideways in iMedia for many reasons. But if you have the RACI matrix for your project handy, all can see when and how many staff had been allocated to the project so it becomes harder for others to influence work reassignment even if they are senior in the organisation. Note we don’t say it guarantees this won’t happen, but it does make it harder!
• One of the good points from a RACI Matrix is that it shows exactly what and where your responsibilities are for the project and what and where line managers have the responsibility. They find it harder to wriggle out of their responsibility when it has been documented. This touches on another benefit from a RACI Matrix, conflict resolution.
• Yes, when it is clear who is responsible and accountable for each stage, quite a few of those stressful internal political wranglings might go away too.

Many are convinced that the RACI Matrix is a change management tool for an organisation and it can certainly have that sort of impact. After all, understanding roles and responsibilities, whether they change over time and their need to be reassessed, is change management. For more along these lines see: Change Management Consultant, and Bruce McGraw, The New Face of Strategic Planning : Bridging it with Project Management is the Key to Success (March 2009), where he advocates strategic management combining the skills of strategic planning with the more coal-face, task-oriented project management.

Finally, it is important to review your projects and pass on any lessons learnt - and this should include any lessons you learn from implementing a RACI Matrix. Could it have been better? How? What other benefits could it have? If it was successful you need to pass that information on too indicating the benefits it brought. The Tips for Capturing Lessons Learnt best practice template, should prove useful for you generally.