Evaluating multi-stakeholder perceptions of your projects impact.

Evaluating multi stakeholder perceptions is requires interaction with the stakeholders  while using a multi criteria approach. Elyse identified perceptions of value are made upon expectations, managing expectations is a large part of the project manager's communications.  The project manager needs to be curtious and inquisitive to discover the sponsors and stakeholders.  This data also supports a communications study called "stakeholder readiness for change."
Elyse further identified the of values are made upon expectations, managing expectations is a large part of the project manager's communications. A Project Manager needs to have a good approach to discover the sponsors and stakeholders perceptions ...

At the basis of values assumes you have some key principles, to set the stage for how something is to be used. We have guiding principles of IT to help organizations understand how to utilize and get value from IT. Along a similar scale, Agile project management has principals to guide usage. In reading the list, it sets the stage for a collaborative creation of something which will be fined tuned into a singing fully adopted tool.

Nine Principles of Agile Project Management are:

• Deliver Something Useful
• Cultivate committed stakeholders and sponsors
• Employ a leadership-collaboration management style
• Build competent collaborative teams
• Empower team decision making
• Use iterative, feature-driven delivery
• Encourage adaptability
• Champion technical excellence
• Accelerate throughput

 According to Guillermo A. Mendoza; Ravi Prabhu  Evaluating multi-stakeholder perceptions of project impacts: a participatory value-based multi-criteria approach.  This approach allows stakeholders to specify impact parameters to be evaluated, which in the context of a value tree, are organized as goals, objectives and alternatives.

The approach is implemented in two phases: Phase I is designed to formulate stakeholders' collective value treefollowing value focused thinking concepts and the cognitive mapping method, and Phase II is a participatory valuation approach based on the Value Tree formed in Phase I. The Value Tree and the Value focused thinking concepts are adopted as tools to capture different stakeholders' values, goals and perceptions. The resulting Value Tree structured as a hierarchy between goals and objectives, and a network consisting of relationships, linkages and cross-impacts of the different alternatives and objectives.

The hierarchy and network structure enables stakeholders to decompose complex assessment problem into 'smaller' units, which makes for easier and clearer assessment context, without ignoring linkages of the units or assessment elements. The second phase allows stakeholders to express their preferences with respect to each assessment element, through a voting system that ultimately leads to measures of importance or relative weights associated with each element. A modified Analytic Hierarchy Process (called Analytic Network Process) was used to distill relative weights from the voting results.

Results obtained from a case study in a Zimbabwean community forest show that the proposed approach is easy to implement and can address questions about whether a project can lead to a positive change in attitudes, and whether the changes actually lead to a propensity to adopt alternatives that the project supports (e.g. conservation-oriented alternatives).

Whose perception of value do we care about? Laurs Brandaua

As project staff, we often deal with stakeholders at multiple levels of the organization. Someone has to help multiple people align around a common understanding of a project concept and then create a plan of action to implement the best possible solution and it’s a natural place for the BA to be, even if their focus is within the IT organization. If we accept that as an IT organization we are responsible for delivering value for the business, the question arises of whose perception of value we honor.

A few weeks back I posted about  delivering value and it’s relationship to quality and speed-to-market in a software development organization. In the comments an interesting dialog surfaced about whose perception of quality and value we care about anyway. It didn’t really get finished off, so I thought I’d take it on again and see if we can’t explore this a bit further.

Where do customers find opportunities of the system. To an executive manager, the opportunity is to reduce cost. That provides quality to the business environment by controlling cost. To the middle manager, the opportunity is to enhance staff productivity, which provides quality in volume delivery to someone. To the end-user, the opportunity is to streamline necessary steps from the daily grind and the quality of that person’s work life is enhanced while meeting the needs of the management.

Benefits Management DougGtheBAAt the project level, there must be some sort of trickle down to align customer expectations of quality and value just like aligning any other aspect of a project, e.g., business rule, process, etc. Lower level stakeholders may not have the same perception of value/quality as the sponsor. Hence, delivery of a solution that is perceived to reduce the quality of work-life, for example, while positively addressing whatever the sponsor views as higher quality, might be deemed as a failure.

Benefits management is the practice of defining and realizing the benefits which a project attains. The key processes to implement a benefit's management approach are:

• Identify Anticipated Project Benefits - While planning for the project, it is a good idea to review the proposed project for business benefits. Developing these benefits is best the responsibility of the project sponsor, as they are advocating for the project. Once the benefits are declared, develop clear concise measure and verification for these benefits.
• Implement a Benefits Value Register - After you have identified the project benefits, it is a good idea to have a Benefits Value Register. The Benefits Value Register is to review through out the project the desired benefits, how their value is mapped to the project, and how they are anticipated to be realized. This register should be a part of your monitoring and control phase.
• Transition Benefit Realization - As a part of project closure, it will be necessary to setup the transition of the benefits into production support. Commonly the entire IT team is not needed at the same rate of effort after the system is in first productive use; however it may take a couple of months or years to achieve the desired benefits. Having the support needs established before hand is key, and normally already documented in the Benefits Value Register.
• Capture and Communicate Benefits Realization - The project sponsor should be held accountable for assuring the benefit is captured and communicated according to schedule. If the benefit is not being achieved, corrective action should be applied to help realize the desired affect.

Order Template 1-21 Evaluating multi-stakeholder Perceptions

Jim Carras
jim@carras.com
Virtual Project Communications (Copyright 2009 Jim Carras)