Stakeholder Management Flimflammery

 

Stakeholder management – what a concept, right? It implies a two-step process: (1) identify and engage your project’s stakeholders, and (2) somehow influence – “manage” – their impact on your pursuit of the project’s objectives.  Unfortunately, each of these steps is fraught with peril.

Let’s take the concept of engaging your project’s so-called stakeholders. Who are they, exactly? Linda Bourne, in her PMI® blog from September 22, 2009, says:

A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) breaks down a stakeholder as a person or organization that:
•    Is actively involved in the project
•    Has interests that may be positively or negatively affected by the performance or completion of the project
•    May exert influence over the project, its deliverables or its team members

Hmmm… the second bullet is most interesting. “Has interests that may be positively or negatively affected by the performance or completion of the project” (emphasis mine). By this definition, General Hideki Tojo was a stakeholder in the Manhattan Project. Should Oppenheimer have “engaged” him? I would have loved to have composed that telegram:

Dear General Tojo – my name is J. Robert Oppenheimer (don’t worry about what the “J” stands for – nobody knows), and I’m the project manager on some work which will most definitely negatively affect your interests. It very well may, in fact, bring your war of aggression to a sudden conclusion, with you on the losing end. Could you arrange to come out to Alamagordo, New Mexico, for a little project briefing? I’ve been led to believe by some self-identified experts that your insights will go a long way towards improving our project performance or attaining project completion, or something.

Sincerely,

J. Bob

And Tojo’s hypothetical reply:

Dear J. Bob – thank you for your telegram of July 15. As an official stakeholder in your mysteriously unnamed project, I am most alarmed that your success will have a negative impact on me personally, and on my nation and its military. I must insist that you immediately cease all efforts on your project, even if it means the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans and Japanese should you fail. Thanks so much for engaging me.

Very Truly Yours,

Hideki

I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve used this construction in this blog, but, do I really have to say it? To include in the definition of “stakeholder” those who actively seek your project’s failure is intellectual vacuousness, and to further assert that these must be included in the project’s decision-making process is sheer folly.  And yet, if Ms. Bourne’s citation is accurate, there’s PMI®, maintaining such a definition in the PMOK Guide® (as a point of fact, Linda’s blog was actually seeking to expand the definition of a stakeholder). Between pushing the concept of engaging stakeholders and the role of risk managers, I think PMI® has positioned itself institutionally as being willing to tolerate trendy, politically-correct nostrums rather than insisting on legitimate management science scholarship – but that’s just my opinion.

Of course, there are practical, usable truisms on the proper way to manage your project’s stakeholders, and I fully intend to explore these in this month’s subsequent blogs. But I wanted to come out of the starting gate (again) with something that I think should be fairly obvious in this particular area of management science, but isn’t: there’s a lot of flimflammery out there on this topic, and it ought to be ignored rather than enshrined in so-called knowledge guides.