At times, client and vendor alike can get a mental picture of organizational stakeholders as the apocalyptic horsemen riding in at the last minute and ruining a perfectly good Drupal website project. The thing that we at times don’t understand is that stakeholders... are great. Some of the most honest, direct, and insightful feedback or ideas that a product owner or project manager can get are going to come from stakeholders. Stakeholders are not to be feared, there are just a few tricks to getting the big wigs involved at the right time with the right input. Let me help you do that with three simple concepts.

Discovery

Drupal is a simple CMS that can be used to do very complex things. And like some of the projects that we as a Drupal company have undertaken, the organizations interested in Drupal support might look simple, but can have some complex behind-the-scenes workings. The best way to get a hold of the tiger by the tail is to talk about stakeholders as early in the process as possible. Large projects will generally have one or two main points of contact on the client side do most of the regular communication and decision making.

At Propeople, we’re making an effort to sit down with those individuals very early, and understand as much about the inner workings of their organization as possible. As the Drupal experts, it’s often up to us to spot trouble before the client even sees it coming. The better we can understand the client’s organization, the higher the chance that we can stop problems before they start. Spoiler alert, if you decide you want to do business with Propeople, keep an eye out for our “responsibility matrix” discussion in the early meetings as a project gets underway.

Education

People familiar with web development, client contacts who have worked with vendors before, and our Drupal experts might understand how projects do and don’t work, but stakeholders probably have different things on their minds. Stakeholders care about whether or not a product is going to reflect well on the organization that they work hard to protect, and if the site is going to act the way they expect it to. To avoid problems at the eleventh hour, it’s important for client and vendor points of contact to sit down and discuss what is possible and what isn’t; making sure that information is repeated, forwarded, communicated, presented, or whatever is necessary to get it to the body of decision makers.

For instance, it’s probably important to make sure that stakeholders understand that when they sign off on designs, they’re signing off on the functionality that goes with them as well. It’s not uncommon for stakeholders to take a look at a project after all the work has been done and change their minds about functionality. If client and vendor discuss change or feature requests up front and make sure that stakeholders understand that the cost of a project is paying for real hours by real developers and not a flat fee for a website with unlimited changes, things tend to go much smoother.

Planning

When looking at how a project timeline lays out, consider the time requirements to get sign-off from every level of the food chain. If the stakeholders aren’t consulted for project feedback until the project is already “complete” both client and vendor may find themselves re-doing a lot of work that could have been done correctly the first time if stakeholder input was planned from the beginning.

Stakeholders are real people too. In fact, most stakeholders are rational, intelligent people who makes good decisions and act as team players as long as they are given the rules of the game up front. Always remember that in any given project there are lots of individuals with different goals and opinions. When client and vendor make intentional efforts to discover more about each other, educate everyone about the collaboration that is about to unfold, and plan for success, it’s amazing just how much everyone starts to like each other, and how successful a project turns out.

Feel free to contact me with any questions, or to learn more about how Propeople can work with you and your stakeholders to make your next project a success. 

Tags: DrupalStrategyproject managementDrupal for BusinessCheck this option to include this post in Planet Drupal aggregator: planetTopics: Business & Strategy