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- Los socios/accionistas tardan un par de meses en pronunciarse sobre la aprobación/rechazo de la puerta de decisión, cuando esperábamos dos semanas en nuestra planificación.
- Los permisos de construcción tardan hasta un año en obtenerse cuando se esperaba obtenerlos en un par de meses.
- La movilización del equipo del proyecto lleva cuatro meses en lugar de uno.
- Los grupos de acción (pescadores, ecologistas, vecinos, etc.) inician acciones para detener el proyecto, ya que solo ven el proyecto como una amenaza.
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- Nuevas organizaciones u organizaciones en expansión, organizaciones que consideran que en el nuevo escenario las partes interesadas seguirán “haciendolo como siempre” y descubren cómo en un nuevo escenario se les presenta una nueva curva de aprendizaje.
- Habilidades de gestión de proyectos, este tema vale la pena un artículo por sí solo, cómo los excelentes profesionales, no significan que serán buenos gerentes y cómo la gestión de proyectos debe basarse en el liderazgo y la influencia y no en la autoridad, especialmente cuando hablamos de interesados externos, porque en la mayoría de ocasiones, la autoridad del director del proyecto representa poco o nada para los interesados externos y el logro solo puede basarse en habilidades de liderazgo, negociación e influencia.
Dear fellows,
Did you ever experience how your partner/shareholders take longer time than expected to approve a decision gate pass? authorities taking longer time than expected to issue permits? Lengthy and painful custom clearance processes? Generally speaking, from external stakeholders to the project management team, they didn´t act as expected.
I am sure that most of you have suffered from these experiences at a certain moment and I am sure, too, that you have identified risks associated with stakeholders based on this kind of uncertainty. Even though having this risk identified in your organization, in many occasions it materializes and has an impact on your project.
However, have you ever considered that this identified risk is getting materialized because the real risk is something else that has never been identified?
To illustrate this situation, I will narrate a story from a previous project:
A multimillion project was carried out in a foreign country. The client was responsible for transportation, import and delivery on site of long-lead items procured by the client. The contractor was responsible for the same activities for materials procured by the contractor.
The contractor prepared the transportation of the equipment, the convoy arrived at the destination port, it stayed at the port. After having the equipments for two weeks at the port and a lot of discussions between custom authorities and the contractor, it was necessary the intervention of a veterinary to verify the compressor´s healthiness. The contractor requested the client to intervene and give its support in the process. Finally, after 45 days, the equipment was released.
We were thankful to God that we didn´t need to vaccinate the compressor of rabies.
The story above is just an example. And in reality, there are some similar situations:
- Partners/shareholders take a couple of months to render a decision on decision gate approval/rejection when we were expecting two weeks in our baseline.
- Construction permits take up to one year to obtain when you were expecting a couple of months for the process.
- Project team mobilization takes four months instead of one.
- Action groups (fishermen, ecologists, neighborhood, etc.) initiate actions to stop the project as they only see the project as a threat.
Client prepared transportation of the equipment, the convoy arrived at the destination port, custom authority was awaiting the arrival of equipment and proceeded with the clearance, within four hours the convoy abandon the port with destination to the site.
Above situation offers the opportunity to perform a fair comparison with similar equipment, time and the same stakeholder involved and investigate why such different outcomes. What made the difference?
After analyzing this situation, we found that the main difference was on how project management, at the client and contractor side, took different approaches to the management of external stakeholders.
Client promoted to embrace stakeholders as part of the project. Stakeholders were always adequately informed, aware of project needs, and what will be required from them for successful project completion. In exchange, project management took stakeholders’ needs and requirements into consideration to support the project in an efficient and agile way.
On the other hand, the contractor never approached the stakeholders involved in this logistic process. The first time they approached the customs authorities to learn their requirements was on the date of arrival of equipment at the destination port and the entire process was ad-hoc. Contractor’s expectation was a similar process to importation between European countries and under this unilateral expectation, the contractor kept stakeholders out of the process until the last minute.
The story above illustrates this particular situation. This kind of situation does not only happen at the contractor side, but similar issues can also be found at the client’s side, too.
With the story above, I want to highlight the very human behavior of placing own fault on someone else plate, in this case, “stakeholder not acting as expected”. Missing the exercise of internal analysis and recognition on how we contribute to this kind of risk are two factors that should be highlighted to analyze the potential failure of the project management role of integration and influencer within the project.
Therefore, the risk that would be raised is how skillful and capable the project team are and processes are adequate to manage and influence project stakeholders.
After identifying our contribution to the risk or identify our own risk, indeed, it will remain a portion of the risk on stakeholders, but this risk will be reduced to the real uncertainty related to the stakeholders.
Splitting and identifying our contribution will allow our organization to analyze and improve our performance and restore the project manager role and obligation to lead and influence stakeholders while building communication and trust bridges with them and ensuring project management is aware of stakeholders’ requirements and interests.
Project stakeholder’s embracement process will convert uncertainty into certainty, allowing project management to consider stakeholders’ requirements and constraints into project plans.
The process above will help to change the title of your risk from “approval take longer than expected” into “approval take longer than agreed” what constitutes a significant difference.
As an example, by interacting with your partners, you find that approval due to project complexity will take two months, you have this certainty of two months approval process and you must build your plan around this constrain, instead of working on the unilateral fake expectation of two weeks. Even though, you can find out and negotiate with your stakeholder if there is a chance to obtain the approval in a shorter time with certain conditions to be fulfilled.
But, what did I find as the root causes of this kind of situation? After reviewing a few projects, I find two main elements supporting this situation:
- New organizations or organizations on expansion, organizations considering that in the new scenario stakeholders will be “business as usual” and they discover how in a new scenario a new learning curve is in front of them.
- Project management skills, this topic worth an article by itself, how excellent doers don´t mean will be good managers and how project management shall rely on leadership and influence and not on authority, especially when we talk about external stakeholders, because in most occasions, project manager authority represents little or nothing to external stakeholders and achievement only can be based on leadership, negotiation and influential skills.
Up to here this article, obviously based in personal experiences, the reader can agree or disagree but I hope it can be help to some of you and confirmation to others on how embracing your stakeholders as part of your project and how management based in leadership and influence can help to mitigate risks and transform uncertainties into certainties.