The Critical Path

This is a reminder that the Influence Score has been retired as of today, 30 March 2020. You can read the initial announcement for additional information surrounding this decision here.

There are many ways to engage within the community, take advantage of programming, and share your knowledge and expertise. We appreciate the feedback that all of you have provided so far!

The ProjectManagement.com community will certainly continue to evolve in exciting ways. And we look forward to new avenues through which to recognize community members’ contributions and demonstrate your helpfulness, impact, and leadership within the community. You all make this an engaging, informative, and valuable space for Project Managers! More to come in 2020, so please keep an eye on the Critical Path!

We are currently experiencing some stability and performance issues with our webinar platform. For this reason, we will be cancelling all live webinars through 27 March 2020. We will continue to evaluate the situation in close coordination with the vendor and provide the community with any updates as they become available. 

Please note ProjectManagement.com offers many other ways to communicate, learn, and interact. Visit one of the discussion forums to pose your most pressing questions to your fellow Project Managers or weigh in on lively debates; participate in a poll; or explore the various topic areas for articles, tools, and templates relevant to your work. On-demand webinars also remain available for viewing at your convenience. Thank you for your patience and understanding during this time.

During 2019, PMI’s Digital Communities team worked on a number of initiatives to increase engagement, enhance the sense of community, and bolster programming within its online community. Check out the Ask Us Anything webinar series to learn more about PMI; talk all things ProjectManagement.com on the Community Central discussion board; or seek guidance from one of our Ambassadors. We look forward to continuing such efforts in 2020 and beyond in order to advance the community!

The community’s evolution has led the team to reevaluate the Influence Score, which was launched in September 2014, and the purpose that it currently serves on ProjectManagement.com. Much has changed over the last five years - we have discovered that there are likely better ways to gauge and encourage engagement within the community.

As the community grows, we would like to find more useful ways to recognize all of the effort that community members put into engaging with each other, lending expertise, and enhancing the community’s vibrancy. For this reason, the Influence Score will be retired as of 30 March 2020. While you will no longer see the Influence Score (blue dialogue box) on your profile, the scores for topic areas (innovation, strategy, change management, agile, etc.) will remain. This functionality offers valuable insight into domain expertise within the community. You will also still be able to view the list of Active Members on the ProjectManagement.com home page.

We are certainly evaluating ways to continue to recognize community members’ contributions and demonstrate your helpfulness, impact, and leadership within the community – stay tuned for updates! As always, please reach out to a Product Specialist if you have any questions.

by Maricarmen Suarez, PMBOK® Guide-Seventh Edition Development Team member

At the center of every project effort, we find people. Stakeholders in various positions can and will impact the outcome of our endeavors. As practitioners, it is essential to engage these stakeholders early and often to understand their needs and interests. Active engagement will be a critical success factor in realizing the intended value of the project. Simply put, choosing whether or not you want to engage stakeholders is not an option—engagement is a must!

An example that comes to mind is a project to contain the further spread of a virus outbreak. There are certainly millions of stakeholders that would have to be considered in this case. A public health crisis not only impacts patients and healthcare workers on the front lines, it also includes the media, medical supply providers, and many others inside and outside of the healthcare industry. Think about the supply and demand challenges should manufacturing plants have to close for an extended period of time. Yes, an outbreak has the potential to disrupt entire markets, and the stakeholder impacts are immense. This can be overwhelming!

While planning the stakeholder engagement, it is crucial to recognize that the stakeholder landscape is rarely static. Individuals or organizations will morph throughout the life cycle of the project; new actors will appear while others move to the background. Their degree of influence will also have ebbs and flows. Focusing on the response to the virus outbreak, we can identify the World Health Organization as a stakeholder with a high degree of influence. This specialized agency is concerned with global public health and leads the collaboration of many other segments to ensure the highest possible levels of health around the globe. Understanding the influence a stakeholder has can help us develop a specific engagement approach.

Another criterion to consider is the impact or the degree to which a stakeholder can effect change. In our example, think of the clinicians and public health officials. They can positively impact the outcome with their clinical management decisions or their ability to share clinical data in a timely fashion. Project leads can act as a force multiplier by being aware of stakeholders’ needs, interests, and opinions. This will allow the project lead to facilitate a shared solution, focusing on delivering value.

People fuel project delivery. Often we can think of this in terms of the “what” and “how” of efforts. The “what” is the result that the project aims to deliver, the outcome ultimately leading to value. The “how” is the behaviors or skills that foster a collaborative stakeholder landscape. Some tools that would help a practitioner in this area include:

• Interpersonal skills: Things like integrity, honesty, and respect are essential to fostering healthy relationships.

• Communication: Open and transparent, a practitioner should be able to flex their style as needed to ensure everyone is engaged and informed.

• Collaboration: We win or lose as a team. Being able to function in a cross-functional environment and craft shared solutions is pivotal to success.

Ultimately, the impact of engaged stakeholders can lead us to develop better response strategies and project outcomes. In our example, engagement can lead to better understanding, carrying out a plan, and communicating effectively. These are certainly steps to achieve the outcome of containing the spread of a virus!

Over the years, I have shifted my perspective from stakeholder management to stakeholder engagement. Humans, unlike widgets, can’t be managed, and attempting to do so is an exercise in futility. They can be engaged within the context of the project type, industry, environment, or delivery approach. Correctly engaging stakeholders, understanding their individual needs and levels of influence, and aligning the project efforts to support those needs is essential. This critical focus area will lead to the achievement of a much stronger outcome. This is why I believe stakeholder engagement is an essential project performance domain for all projects regardless of type and approach.

The PMI Sponsored Research Program awards grants of up to US$50,000 per project to support research whose themes and perspectives have direct application to theory and/or practice of project management.

The 2021 call for proposals is now open through 25 April 2020.

We encourage proposals on research involving multi-disciplinary teams of investigators or teams consisting of academics and practitioners who bring new ways of thinking and related bodies of literature to the field of project management. Investigators are welcome from both within and outside the field of project management, including management, organizational psychology, sociology, education, linguistics and others.

To learn more about the program, including eligibility criteria, submission guidelines, key dates, and more, visit https://www.pmi.org/learning/academic-research/sponsored. You will also find published research from past PMI Sponsored Research Program-funded projects at https://www.pmi.org/learning/academic-research/published.

Proposals can be submitted directly at https://pmi.submittable.com/submit.