A “Stakeholder Engagement” Horror Story

 

Some years back I was invited to participate in the creation of PMI’s® Practice Standard for Earned Value Management by its project manager, who had been reading my columns in PMNetwork magazine and wanted my input. Typically, contributors to these PMI® projects volunteer, and I had not intended to participate prior to the invitation due to the sheer number of pro bono writing requests I receive. But this one intrigued me, so I accepted the invitation, started writing, and prepared for the first meeting of the team.

The first such meeting was held in Costa Mesa, California, in a ballroom of the hotel where most of us were staying. Through this effort I would get to work with some truly talented people in the field, like the incomparable Gary Humphries and the insightful Jim Wrisley. However, there were some others whom I came to believe were there, not to add insights or help others, but for purposes more closely resembling self-aggrandizement. As the first session of reviewing my text got underway, these people – who, I must stress, fit the classic definition of “stakeholders” – set about their agenda.

The PM projected my first few paragraphs onto the screen. Half the room erupted into objections, while the others insisted those words were perfect for the stated document’s objectives. Then, the next few paragraphs would be projected, and the half of the stakeholders who had previously asserted that the writing was completely unacceptable did a one-eighty, and insisted that these next paragraphs were fine, whereas the previous supporters suddenly turned into the harshest critics. And so it went, hour after hour, the whole weekend long. We got nowhere.

Taking with me a pile of inchoate, often contradictory edits, I set about to try to appease the greatest number of critics in the run-up to the second meeting, this one being held in Kissimmee, Florida. This time, though, there were presentations and speeches to endure prior to tackling the actual verbiage. One widely-travelled fellow actually made a pitch that the opinions reflected in the Practice Standard ought to reflect only those who had an “international” take on the subject. Of course, he wasn’t appealing to being given a larger writing assignment – in my opinion he just wanted to have some sort of veto power over what the actual writers were doing, apparently based on the frequency with which his passport got punched. And so went the second session, again, getting absolutely nowhere.

A few months later PMI® was arranging for the principals of all of the then-commissioned practice standards to attend a series of sessions back in Pennsylvania. These were briefings from legal experts, warning of the consequences of plagiarism, presentations from PMI® execs, and a talk from a representative from the American National Standards Institute, better known as ANSI. Since this work’s PM couldn’t make this meeting, he hastily appointed me Deputy PM, and I made arrangements to attend.

At the ANSI presentation, the rep made a comment that I will never forget. He stated that, in order for any of our practice standards to be considered viable, they must pass a very basic test: that no person considered an expert in the field would object to anything put forth in the practice standard. I raised my hand.

“Excuse me, but we’re dealing with a bunch of project management-types here. You could put fifty of them in a room, and they wouldn’t agree on the color of an orange. How on Earth do you expect that level of consensus?”

The guy wouldn’t budge, which is when I began to realize our effort was doomed.

The Practice Standard would eventually be published, but with the words of a ghost writer. The PM simply could not overcome the division among the partisan stakeholders, and so resorted to a vehicle blissfully independent of the self-aggrandizers. My name is on the list of contributors for the first edition, but I’m fairly sure that very little of my actual input made it to the final draft. The document itself is fairly mushy, but, hey! At least we engaged the stakeholders, right?