Live from BAWorld: Getting Your Stakeholders to Help You

Marie Bankuti from Tether Free Vision presented “Help Me Help You! How to Proactively Educate Your Business Stakeholders for Greater Project Success” this morning at BAWorld Boston. She discussed the typical challenges to project success that we see on projects and had the audience contribute. The ideas the audience came up with included conflicting interests, trouble articulating a vision of success, business users were cocky and thought they could do it without IT’s overhead, no time from the business, and pressure to hit dates and cannot focus on what is really needed in that time.

To summarize Marie’s suggestions:

1. Understand your stake, meaning vision or mission. Understand yours, your users’, your IT groups’, your and company’s.
2. Nurture your relationships, including understanding the people who you work with, their pains, and even what they do outside work.
3. Explain your process. Do this through things like case studies of it working or not, and just explaining why it’s needed.
4. Define expectations. Make sure it’s clear how you each will communicate, what the roles and responsibilities are, and what accountability there is.
5. Ensure credibility. This means things like disagreeing tactfully and with respect, collaborate, follow through on commitments, but in general model the behavior you seek from the teams you work with.

All in all, Marie gave a nice general overview of how to get teams to work with you.

INCOSE 2008 – Systems Engineering Railroads - So Many Requirements Stakeholders

The opening talk on Monday at INCOSE 2008, “Crossing Borders by Applying Systems Engineering”, was by Bert Klerk, the CEO of ProRail, who runs the railway system of the Netherlands. Behind Japan and Switzerland, this country is 3rd in the list of most densely used railroad networks. They have 6500 km of track and because they are a land of much water, 4500 bridges to cross. This is clearly a large system which has had great success from applying systems engineering principles.

This is not the first time I’ve heard a talk about a project for Europe’s rail systems. I find it to be a very interesting topic, and though I have never worked on a railway project, I can see the challenges so clearly. This talk highlighted an example of a track to be laid that in particular had to cross a small river. They put out bids to contractors to see who could most cleverly navigate this river while staying under budget; and the winner’s solution was implemented. But the point here is systems engineering on this scale involves hundreds of stakeholders. When dealing with these large scale systems – you cannot just think about the users at all, the scope spans way beyond that. It’s not just those people using the tracks, those operating and maintaining them, but also those who are impacted by the train system deployed – the town people who enjoy the river. And while they are not direct users, you cannot ignore them – they might actually put up big roadblocks to deploying the system.

Anyway, if you can imagine how hard it is to get 200 users aligned – now imagine you have 30 types of stakeholders with a couple hundred of each and most of them will never actually use the thing you are building. Try to keep that group satisfied!