Contingency Planning

Developing a Good 'Plan B'

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Have a solid Plan B ready.

© iStockphoto/WendellFranks

Fires, floods, tornadoes – these are the things we often connect with contingency planning. But what if your main supplier suddenly goes bankrupt? Or, what if your entire sales force gets sick with food poisoning at your annual sales conference? Or, your payroll clerk simply calls in sick on payroll day? These things can all cause confusion and disorder if you haven't prepared for them properly. Contingency planning is a key part of this preparation.
As you see, contingency planning is not just about major disasters. On a smaller scale, it's about preparing for events such as the loss of data, people, customers, and suppliers, and other disruptive unknowns. That's why it's important to make contingency planning a normal part of your everyday business operations.

Risk Assessment

The need for contingency planning emerges from a thorough analysis of the risks that your organization faces. It's also useful in thinking about new and ongoing projects: what happens when 'Plan A' doesn't go as expected? Sometimes Plan A simply means 'business as usual.' Other times, with more sophisticated risk management plans, Plan A is your first response to deal with an identified risk – and when Plan A doesn't work, you use your contingency plan.
Use these principles in your risk assessment process:

• Address all business-critical operations – No matter where your contingency planning starts, a good plan identifies critical business functions, and it outlines a way to minimize losses.
• Identify risks – The first part of an effective risk analysis is to identify the various risks that your business may face. What has the potential to significantly disrupt or harm your project or business operations? The end result of a risk analysis is usually a huge list of potential threats. If you try to produce a contingency plan for each, you may be overwhelmed. This is why you must prioritize.
• Prioritizing risks – One of the greatest challenges of contingency planning is making sure you don't plan too much. You need a careful balance between overpreparation for something that may never happen, and adequate preparation so that you can respond quickly and effectively to a crisis situation when necessary.
• Risk Impact/Probability Charts help you find this balance. With these, you analyze the impact of each risk, and you assign a likelihood of it occurring. Then it's easier to determine which risks require the expense and effort of risk mitigation. Business processes that are essential to long-term survival – like maintaining cash flow, staff support, and market share – are typically at the top of the list.
• Note that contingency planning isn't the only action that emerges as a result of risk analysis – you can manage risk by using existing assets more effectively or by investing in new resources or services that help you manage it (such as insurance). Also, if a risk is particularly unlikely to materialize, you may decide to do nothing about it, and manage around it if the situation arises.

Contingency Planning Challenges

You should be aware of a few common obstacles as you begin your contingency planning process:

• People are often poorly motivated to develop a strong ‘Plan B’ because they have too much of an emotional investment in the ‘Plan A’ they want to deliver. Stress that Plan B should be properly thought-through.
• There’s usually a low probability of a crisis occurring, so people often don’t feel a sense of urgency to create a contingency plan, meaning that it gets stuck at the bottom of their To Do Lists. Unfortunately, this may mean that contingency planning ends up as a task that never gets done.
• Organizational politics can interfere with prioritizing risk, because many people may want to be seen as an essential part of recovery efforts. If you include all key business managers in the risk assessment and prioritization process, this may help you reach agreement.

Developing the Plan

Remember these guidelines when it's time to prepare your contingency plan:

• Your main goal is to maintain business operations – Look closely at what you need to do to deliver a minimum level of service and functionality.
• Define time periods – What must be done during the first hour of the plan being implemented? The first day? The first week? If you break down the plan, you're less likely to leave out important details.
• Identify the trigger – What specifically will cause you to implement the contingency plan? Decide which actions you'll take, and when. Determine who is in charge at each stage and what type of reporting process they must follow.
• Keep the plan simple – You don't know who will read and implement the plan when it's needed, so use clear and plain language.
• Consider related resource restrictions – Will your organization be able to function the same way if you have to implement Plan B, or will Plan B necessarily reduce capabilities?
• Identify everyone's needs – Have people throughout the company identify what they must have, at a minimum, to continue operations.
• Define 'success' – What will you need to do to return to 'business as usual'?
• Include contingency plans in standard operating procedures – Make sure you provide initial training on the plan, and keep everyone up-to-date on changes.
• Manage your risks – Look for opportunities to reduce risk, wherever possible. This may help you reduce, or even eliminate, the need for full contingency plans in certain areas.
• Identify operational inefficiencies – Provide a standard to document your planning process, and find opportunities for performance improvement.

Disaster recovery specifics are beyond the scope of this article. For more information on this topic, can listen to our Expert Interview with Kathy McKee, 'Leading People Through Disasters'.

Maintaining the Plan

After you prepare the contingency plan, you need to do several things to keep it practical and relevant – don't just create a document and file it away. As your business changes, you'll need to review and update these plans accordingly.
Here are some key steps in the contingency plan maintenance process:

• Communicate the plan to everyone in the organization.
• Inform people of their roles and responsibilities related to the plan.
• Provide necessary training for people to fulfill these roles and responsibilities.
• Conduct disaster drills where practical.
• Assess the results of training and drills, and make any necessary changes.
• Review the plan on a regular basis, especially if there are relevant technological, operational, and personnel changes.
• Distribute revised plans throughout the company, and make sure the old plan is discarded.
• Audit the plan periodically:
  
  • Reassess the risks to the business.
  • Analyze efforts to control risk by comparing actual performance to the performance level described in the contingency plan.
  • Recommend and make changes, if necessary.

Key Points

Contingency planning is ignored in many companies. Day-to-day operations are demanding, and the probability of a significant business disruption is small, so it's hard to make time to prepare a good plan. However, if you're proactive in the short term, you'll help ensure a quicker and more effective recovery from an operational setback in the long term, and you may save your organization from failure in the event that risks materialize.

A contingency planning process also helps you gain significant insight into the risks your organization faces. This enables you to develop an effective planning strategy that will immediately add value to the business. Contingency planning requires an investment of time and resources, but if you fail to do it – or if you do it poorly – the costs could be significant if a disaster happens.

Risk Analysis

Evaluating and Managing Risks

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Find out how to do a risk analysis,
with James Manktelow and Amy Carlson.

Almost all of the things that we do at work involve risk of some kind, but it can sometimes be challenging to identify risk, let alone to prepare for it.
Risk Analysis helps you understand risk, so that you can manage it, and minimize disruption to your plans. Risk Analysis also helps you control risk in a cost-effective way.
In this article, we'll look at how you can identify and manage risk effectively.

What is Risk Analysis?

Risk Analysis helps you identify and manage potential problems that could undermine key business initiatives or projects.
Risk is made up of two things: the probability of something going wrong, and the negative consequences that will happen if it does.
You carry out a Risk Analysis by first identifying the possible threats that you face, and by then estimating the likelihood that these threats will materialize.
Risk Analysis can be quite involved, and it's useful in a variety of situations. To do an in-depth analysis, you'll need to draw on detailed information such as project plans, financial data, security protocols, marketing forecasts, or other relevant information.

When to Use Risk Analysis

Risk analysis is useful in many situations, for example, when you're:

• Planning projects, to help you anticipate and neutralize possible problems.
• Deciding whether or not to move forward with a project.
• Improving safety and managing potential risks in the workplace.
• Preparing for events such as equipment or technology failure, theft, staff sickness, or natural disasters.
• Planning for changes in your environment, such as new competitors coming into the market, or changes to government policy.

How to Use Risk Analysis

To carry out a risk analysis, follow these steps:

1. Identify Threats

The first step in Risk Analysis is to identify the existing and possible threats that you might face. These can come from many different sources. For instance:

• Human - from illness, death, injury, or other loss of a key individual.
• Operational - from disruption to supplies and operations, loss of access to essential assets, or failures in distribution.
• Reputational - from loss of customer or employee confidence, or damage to market reputation.
• Procedural - from failures of accountability, internal systems and controls; or from fraud.
• Project - from going over budget, taking too long on key tasks, or experiencing issues with product or service quality.
• Financial - from business failure, stock market fluctuations, interest rate changes, or non-availability of funding.
• Technical - from advances in technology, or from technical failure.
• Natural - from weather, natural disasters, or disease.
• Political - from changes in tax, public opinion, government policy, or foreign influence.
• Structural - from dangerous chemicals, poor lighting, falling boxes, or any situation where staff, products, or technology can be harmed.

It's easy to overlook important threats, so make sure that you do as thorough an analysis as you can. You can use a number of different approaches to do this:

• Run through a list such as the one above to see if any of these threats are relevant.
• Think about the systems, processes, or structures that you use, and analyze risks to any part of these. Then, see if you can spot any vulnerabilities within them.
• Ask others who might have different perspectives. If you're leading a team, ask for input from your people, and consult other people in your organization or those who have run similar projects.

Tools such as SWOT Analysis and PEST Analysis can also help you uncover threats, while Scenario Analysis helps you explore threats that you might encounter in the "different futures" that your organization might face.

2. Estimate Risk

Once you've identified the threats you're facing, you need to work out both the likelihood of these threats being realized, and their possible impact.
One way of doing this is to make your best estimate of the probability of the event occurring, and then multiply this by the amount it will cost you to set things right if it happens. This gives you a value for the risk:

Risk Value = Probability of Event x Cost of Event

As a simple example, let's say that you've identified a risk that your rent may increase substantially.
You think that there's an 80 percent chance of this happening within the next year, because your landlord has recently increased rents for other businesses. If this happens, it will cost your business an extra $500,000 over the next year.
So the risk value of the rent increase is:

0.80 (Probability of Event) x $500,000 (Cost of Event) = $400,000 (Risk Value)

You can also use a Risk Impact/Probability Chart to assess risk. By using these charts, you can quickly identify which risks you need to focus on.

Tip:
Don't rush this step. Gather as much information as you can so that you can estimate the probability of an event occurring, and its costs, as accurately as possible. Probabilities are particularly hard to assess: where you can, base these on past data.

3. Manage Risk

Once you've identified the value of the risks you face, you can start to look at ways of managing them.
When you do this, it's important to choose cost-effective approaches - in many cases, there's no point in spending more to eliminate a risk than the cost of the event if it occurs. So, it may be better to accept the risk than it is to use excessive resources to eliminate it. Be sensible in how you apply this, though, especially if this involves ethical decisions or affects people's safety.
You can manage risks by:

• Using existing assets - this may involve reusing or redeploying existing equipment, improving existing methods and systems, changing people's responsibilities, improving accountability and internal controls, and so on.
• You can also manage risks by adding or changing things. For instance, you could do this by choosing different materials, by improving safety procedures or safety gear, or by adding a layer of security to your organization's IT systems.
• Developing a contingency plan - this is where you accept a risk, but develop a plan to minimize its effects if it happens.
• A good contingency plan will allow you to take action immediately, and with the minimum of project control, if you find yourself in a crisis. Contingency plans also form a key part of Business Continuity Planning (BCP) or Business Continuity Management (BCM).
• Investing in new resources - your Risk Analysis will help you decide whether you need to bring in additional resources to counter the risk. This can include insuring the risk - this is particularly important where the risk is so great that it can threaten your solvency.
• You might also want to develop a procedural prevention plan. This defines the activities that need to take place every day, week, month, or year to monitor or mitigate the risks you've identified. For example, you may want to arrange a daily backup of computer files, yearly testing of your building's sprinkler system, or a monthly check on your organization's security system.

4. Review

Once you've carried out a Risk Analysis and have managed risks appropriately, conduct regular reviews. This is because the costs and impacts of some risks may change, other risks may become obsolete, and new risks may appear.
These reviews may involve re-doing your Risk Analysis, as well as testing systems and plans appropriately.

Key Points

Risk Analysis is a proven way of identifying and assessing factors that could negatively affect the success of a business or project. It allows you to examine the risks that you or your organization face, and decide whether or not to move forward with a decision.
You do a Risk Analysis by identify threats, and by then estimating the likelihood of those threats being realized.
Once you've worked out the value of the risks you face, you can start looking at ways to manage them effectively. This may include using existing assets, developing a contingency plan, or investing in new resources.

Be thorough with your Risk Analysis, and be sensible with how you apply your findings.

The McKinsey 7S Framework

Ensuring That All Parts of Your Organization Work in Harmony

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Learn how to use the 7S Framework,
with James Manktelow & Amy Carlson.

How do you go about analyzing how well your organization is positioned to achieve its intended objective? This is a question that has been asked for many years, and there are many different answers.
Some approaches look at internal factors, others look at external ones, some combine these perspectives, and others look for congruence between various aspects of the organization being studied. Ultimately, the issue comes down to which factors to study.
While some models of organizational effectiveness go in and out of fashion, one that has persisted is the McKinsey 7S framework. Developed in the early 1980s by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, two consultants working at the McKinsey & Company consulting firm, the basic premise of the model is that there are seven internal aspects of an organization that need to be aligned if it is to be successful.
The 7S model can be used in a wide variety of situations where an alignment perspective is useful, for example to help you:

• Improve the performance of a company.
• Examine the likely effects of future changes within a company.
• Align departments and processes during a merger or acquisition.
• Determine how best to implement a proposed strategy.

Tip:
The McKinsey 7S model can be applied to elements of a team or a project as well. The alignment issues apply, regardless of how you decide to define the scope of the areas you study.

The Seven Elements

The McKinsey 7S model involves seven interdependent factors which are categorized as either "hard" or "soft" elements:

Hard Elements	Soft Elements
Strategy Structure Systems	Shared Values Skills Style Staff

"Hard" elements are easier to define or identify and management can directly influence them: These are strategy statements; organization charts and reporting lines; and formal processes and IT systems.
"Soft" elements, on the other hand, can be more difficult to describe, and are less tangible and more influenced by culture. However, these soft elements are as important as the hard elements if the organization is going to be successful.
The way the model is presented in Figure 1 below depicts the interdependency of the elements and indicates how a change in one affects all the others.

Let's look at each of the elements specifically:

• Strategy: the plan devised to maintain and build competitive advantage over the competition.
• Structure: the way the organization is structured and who reports to whom.
• Systems: the daily activities and procedures that staff members engage in to get the job done.
• Shared Values: called "superordinate goals" when the model was first developed, these are the core values of the company that are evidenced in the corporate culture and the general work ethic.
• Style: the style of leadership adopted.
• Staff: the employees and their general capabilities.
• Skills: the actual skills and competencies of the employees working for the company.

Note:
Placing Shared Values in the middle of the model emphasizes that these values are central to the development of all the other critical elements. The company's structure, strategy, systems, style, staff and skills all stem from why the organization was originally created, and what it stands for. The original vision of the company was formed from the values of the creators. As the values change, so do all the other elements.

How to Use the Model

Now you know what the model covers, how can you use it?
The model is based on the theory that, for an organization to perform well, these seven elements need to be aligned and mutually reinforcing. So, the model can be used to help identify what needs to be realigned to improve performance, or to maintain alignment (and performance) during other types of change.
Whatever the type of change – restructuring, new processes, organizational merger, new systems, change of leadership, and so on – the model can be used to understand how the organizational elements are interrelated, and so ensure that the wider impact of changes made in one area is taken into consideration.
You can use the 7S model to help analyze the current situation (Point A), a proposed future situation (Point B) and to identify gaps and inconsistencies between them. It's then a question of adjusting and tuning the elements of the 7S model to ensure that your organization works effectively and well once you reach the desired endpoint.
Sounds simple? Well, of course not: Changing your organization probably will not be simple at all! Whole books and methodologies are dedicated to analyzing organizational strategy, improving performance and managing change. The 7S model is a good framework to help you ask the right questions – but it won't give you all the answers. For that you'll need to bring together the right knowledge, skills and experience.
When it comes to asking the right questions, we've developed a Mind Tools checklist and a matrix to keep track of how the seven elements align with each other. Supplement these with your own questions, based on your organization's specific circumstances and accumulated wisdom.

7S Checklist Questions

Here are some of the questions that you'll need to explore to help you understand your situation in terms of the 7S framework. Use them to analyze your current (Point A) situation first, and then repeat the exercise for your proposed situation (Point B).
Strategy:

• What is our strategy?
• How do we intend to achieve our objectives?
• How do we deal with competitive pressure?
• How are changes in customer demands dealt with?
• How is strategy adjusted for environmental issues?

Structure:

• How is the company/team divided?
• What is the hierarchy?
• How do the various departments coordinate activities?
• How do the team members organize and align themselves?
• Is decision making and controlling centralized or decentralized? Is this as it should be, given what we're doing?
• Where are the lines of communication? Explicit and implicit?

Systems:

• What are the main systems that run the organization? Consider financial and HR systems as well as communications and document storage.
• Where are the controls and how are they monitored and evaluated?
• What internal rules and processes does the team use to keep on track?

Shared Values:

• What are the core values?
• What is the corporate/team culture?
• How strong are the values?
• What are the fundamental values that the company/team was built on?

Style:

• How participative is the management/leadership style?
• How effective is that leadership?
• Do employees/team members tend to be competitive or cooperative?
• Are there real teams functioning within the organization or are they just nominal groups?

Staff:

• What positions or specializations are represented within the team?
• What positions need to be filled?
• Are there gaps in required competencies?

Skills:

• What are the strongest skills represented within the company/team?
• Are there any skills gaps?
• What is the company/team known for doing well?
• Do the current employees/team members have the ability to do the job?
• How are skills monitored and assessed?

7S Matrix Questions

Using the information you have gathered, now examine where there are gaps and inconsistencies between elements. Remember you can use this to look at either your current or your desired organization.
Click here to download our McKinsey 7S Worksheet, which contains a matrix that you can use to check off alignment between each of the elements as you go through the following steps:

• Start with your Shared Values: Are they consistent with your structure, strategy, and systems? If not, what needs to change?
• Then look at the hard elements. How well does each one support the others? Identify where changes need to be made.
• Next look at the other soft elements. Do they support the desired hard elements? Do they support one another? If not, what needs to change?
• As you adjust and align the elements, you'll need to use an iterative (and often time consuming) process of making adjustments, and then re-analyzing how that impacts other elements and their alignment. The end result of better performance will be worth it.

Tip:
For similar approaches to this, see our articles on the Burke-Litwin Change Model, and the Congruence Model. You may also find our articles on the Change Curve, Impact Analysis and Lewin's Change Management Model useful.

Key Points

The McKinsey 7Ss model is one that can be applied to almost any organizational or team effectiveness issue. If something within your organization or team isn't working, chances are there is inconsistency between some of the elements identified by this classic model. Once these inconsistencies are revealed, you can work to align the internal elements to make sure they are all contributing to the shared goals and values.

The process of analyzing where you are right now in terms of these elements is worthwhile in and of itself. But by taking this analysis to the next level and determining the ultimate state for each of the factors, you can really move your organization or team forward.

Impact Analysis

Identifying the Full Consequences of Change
(Also known as Change Impact Analysis, Impact Change Analysis and Solution Effect Analysis)

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How to do Impact Analysis,
with James Manktelow & Amy Carlson.

When things change in your organization, do you ever wish that someone would think things through a little better to avoid the confusion and disruption that often follows?
Or have you ever been involved in a project where, with hindsight, a great deal of pain could have been avoided with a little more up-front preparation and planning?
Hindsight is a wonderful thing – but so, too, is Impact Analysis. This technique is a useful and severely under-used brainstorming technique that helps you think through the full impacts of a proposed change. As such, it is an essential part of the evaluation process for major decisions.
More than this, it gives you the ability to spot problems before they arise, so that you can develop contingency plans to handle issues smoothly. This can make the difference between well-controlled and seemingly-effortless project management, and an implementation that is seen by your boss, team, clients and peers as a shambles.

About the Tool

Impact Analysis is a technique designed to unearth the "unexpected" negative effects of a change on an organization.
It provides a structured approach for looking at a proposed change, so that you can identify as many of the negative impacts or consequences of the change as possible. Firstly, this makes it an important tool for evaluating whether you want to run a project. Secondly, and once the decision to go ahead has been made, it helps you prepare for and manage any serious issues that may arise.
All too often organizations do not undertake Impact Analysis. This is one reason that so many projects end in failure, as unforeseen consequences wreak havoc.

The Challenge of Impact Analysis

The challenge in conducting an Impact Analysis is firstly to capture and structure all the likely consequences of a decision; and then, importantly, to ensure that these are managed appropriately.
For smaller decisions, it can be conducted as a desk exercise. For larger or more risky decisions, it is best conducted with an experienced team, ideally with people from different functional backgrounds within the organization: With a team like this, you're much more likely to spot all of the consequences of a decision than if you conduct the analysis on your own.

How to use Impact Analysis

To conduct an effective Impact Analysis, use the following steps:

1. Prepare for Impact Analysis

The first step is to gather a good team, with access to the right information sources. Make sure that the project or solution proposed is clearly defined, and that everyone involved in the assessment is clearly briefed as to what is proposed and the problems that it is intended to address.

2. Brainstorm Major Areas Affected

Now brainstorm the major areas affected by the decision or project, and think about whom or what it might affect.
Different organizations will have different areas – this is why it's worth spending a little time getting this top level brainstorming correct.
Figure 1 below shows a number of different approaches that may be useful as starting points for identifying the areas that apply to you.

Figure 1: Impact Analysis – Major Areas Affected
This figure gives a number of different frameworks that you can use as a starting point for Impact Analysis brainstorming. Pick the framework that's most relevant for you, "mix and match" them appropriately, and include other areas where they're more relevant.
And remember as far as you can to involve the people most likely to be affected by the decision: They'll most-likely have more insight into the consequences of the decision than you have.
A. Organizational Approach:

• Impacts on different departments.
• Impacts on different business processes.
• Impacts on different customer groups.
• Impacts on different groups of people.

B. McKinsey 7Ss Approach:
Using the popular "McKinsey 7Ss" approach to thinking about the things that are important to an organization:

• Strategy
• Structure
• Systems
• Shared Values
• Skills
• Styles
• Staff

C. Tools-Based Approach:
There's a lot of overlap here between Impact Analysis and some of the other tools we explain on Mind Tools, particularly Risk Analysis, Risk/Impact Probability Charts and Stakeholder Analysis.

You can use the headings given within the Risk Analysis article as one set of starting points for brainstorming, and use Stakeholder Analysis for thinking about the people who might be affected by the decision.

3. Identify All Areas

Now, for each of the major areas identified, brainstorm all of the different elements that could be affected. For example, if you're looking at departments, list all of the departments in your organization. If you're looking at processes, map out the business processes you operate, starting with the process the customer experiences, then moving on to the business processes that support this.
The extent to which you're able to do this depends on the scale of the decision and the time available. Just make sure you go far enough, without getting bogged down in micro-detail.

4. Evaluate Impacts

Having listed all of the groups of people and everything that will be affected in an appropriate level of detail, the next step is to work through these lists identifying and listing the possible negative and positive impacts of the decision, and making an estimate of the size of the impact and the consequences of the decision.

5. Manage the Consequences

Now's the time to turn this information into action.
If you're using Impact Analysis as part of the decision making process, you need to weigh whether you want to go ahead with the project or decision proposed. You'll need to ask yourself whether it's worth going ahead with the project given the negative consequences it will cause and given the cost of managing those negative consequences.
If you're managing a project which has already been given the go-ahead, you'll need to think about things like:

• The actions you'll need to take to manage or mitigate these consequences.
• How you'll prepare the people affected so that they'll understand and (ideally) support change rather than fighting against it.
• The contingency strategy needed to manage the situation should the negative consequences arise.

Tip:
Remember that few changes happen in isolation. The effects they cause can be diminished or amplified by other things that are going on. When you are thinking about impacts, think about the context you're operating in, and also think about how people might react to the change and work with it or against it.

Stakeholder Management

Planning Stakeholder Communication

By Rachel Thompson, who has fifteen years experience of helping organizations and business leaders to manage change and work more effectively.

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Who needs to know what, and when?

© iStockphoto

"Stakeholder management is critical to the success of every project in every organization I have ever worked with. By engaging the right people in the right way in your project, you can make a big difference to its success... and to your career."
Having conducted a Stakeholder Analysis exercise, you will have most of the information you need to plan how to manage communication with your stakeholders.
You will have identified the stakeholders in your job and in your projects, and will have marked out their positions on a stakeholder map.
The next stage is to plan your communication so that you can win them around to support your projects. Stakeholder Planning is the process by which you do this.
To carry out a Stakeholder Planning exercise, download our free Stakeholder Communications worksheet. This is a table with the following column headings:

• Stakeholder Name.
• Communications Approach.
• Key Interests and Issues.
• Current Status – Advocate, supporter, neutral, critic, blocker.
• Desired Support – High, medium or low.
• Desired Project Role (if any).
• Actions Desired (if any).
• Messages Needed.
• Actions and Communications.

Using this table, work through the planning exercise using the steps below:

1. Update the Worksheet with Power/Interest Grid Information

Based on the Power/Interest Grid you created in your Stakeholder Analysis, enter the stakeholders' names, their influence and interest in your job or project, and your current assessment of where they stand with respect to it.

2. Plan Your Approach to Stakeholder Management

The amount of time you should allocate to Stakeholder Management depends on the size and difficulty of your projects and goals, the time you have available for communication, and the amount of help you need to achieve the results you want.
Think through the help you need, the amount of time that will be taken to manage this and the time you will need for communication. Help with the project could include sponsorship of the project, advice and expert input, reviews of material to increase quality, etc.

3. Think Through What You Want From Each Stakeholder

Next, work through your list of stakeholders thinking through the levels of support you want from them and the roles you would like them to play (if any). Think through the actions you would like them to perform. Write this information down in the "Desired Support," "Desired Project Role," and "Actions Desired" columns.

4. Identify the Messages You Need to Convey

Next, identify the messages that you need to convey to your stakeholders to persuade them to support you and engage with your projects or goals. Typical messages will show the benefits to the person or organization of what you are doing, and will focus on key performance drivers like increasing profitability or delivering real improvements.

5. Identify Actions and Communications

Finally, work out what you need to do to win and manage the support of these stakeholders. With the time and resource you have available, identify how you will manage the communication to and the input from your stakeholders.
Focusing on the high-power/high-interest stakeholders first and the low-interest/low-power stakeholders last, devise a practical plan that communicates with people as effectively as possible and that communicates the right amount of information in a way that neither under nor over-communicates.
Think through what you need to do to keep your best supporters engaged and on-board. Work out how to win over or neutralize the opposition of skeptics. Where you need the active support of people who are not currently interested in what you are doing, think about how you can engage them and raise their level of interest.
Also, consider how what you are doing will affect your stakeholders. Where appropriate, let people know as early as possible of any difficult issues that may arise, and discuss with them how you can minimize or manage any impact.

Tip:
It is usually a good idea to manage people's expectations about likely problems as early as possible. This gives them time to think through how to manage issues, and preserves your reputation for reliability.

Once you have prepared your Stakeholder Plan, all you need to do is to implement it. As with all plans, it will be easier to implement if you break it down into a series of small, achievable steps and action these one-by-one.

Key Points

As the work you do and the projects you run become more important, you will affect more and more people. Some of these people have the power to undermine your projects and your position. Others may be strong supporters of your work.
Stakeholder Management is the process by which you identify your key stakeholders and win their support.
Stakeholder Analysis is the first stage of this, where you identify and start to understand your most important stakeholders. Once you have completed your Stakeholder Analysis, the next stage is Stakeholder Planning. This is the process you use to plan how to manage your stakeholders and gain their support for your projects.
To prepare your plan, go through the following steps:

1. Update the planning sheet with information from the power/interest grid.
2. Think through your approach to stakeholder management.
3. Work out what you want from each stakeholder.
4. Identify the messages you need to convey.
5. Identify actions and communications.

Good Stakeholder Management helps you to manage the politics that can often come with major projects. It helps you win support for your projects and eliminates a major source of project and work stress.

Stakeholder Analysis

Winning Support for Your Projects

By Rachel Thompson, who has fifteen years experience of helping organizations and business leaders to manage change and work more effectively.

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© iStockphoto/timsa

"Stakeholder management is critical to the success of every project in every organization I have ever worked with. By engaging the right people in the right way in your project, you can make a big difference to its success... and to your career."
As you become more successful in your career, the actions you take and the projects you run will affect more and more people. The more people you affect, the more likely it is that your actions will impact people who have power and influence over your projects. These people could be strong supporters of your work – or they could block it.
Stakeholder Management is an important discipline that successful people use to win support from others. It helps them ensure that their projects succeed where others fail.
Stakeholder Analysis is the technique used to identify the key people who have to be won over. You then use Stakeholder Planning to build the support that helps you succeed.
The benefits of using a stakeholder-based approach are that:

• You can use the opinions of the most powerful stakeholders to shape your projects at an early stage. Not only does this make it more likely that they will support you, their input can also improve the quality of your project
• Gaining support from powerful stakeholders can help you to win more resources – this makes it more likely that your projects will be successful
• By communicating with stakeholders early and frequently, you can ensure that they fully understand what you are doing and understand the benefits of your project – this means they can support you actively when necessary
• You can anticipate what people's reaction to your project may be, and build into your plan the actions that will win people's support.

How to Use the Tool

The first step in Stakeholder Analysis is to identify who your stakeholders are. The next step is to work out their power, influence and interest, so you know who you should focus on. The final step is to develop a good understanding of the most important stakeholders so that you know how they are likely to respond, and so that you can work out how to win their support – you can record this analysis on a stakeholder map.
After you have used this tool and created a stakeholder map, you can use the stakeholder planning tool to plan how you will communicate with each stakeholder.
The steps of Stakeholder Analysis are explained below:

Step 1 – Identify Your Stakeholders

The first step in your Stakeholder Analysis is to brainstorm who your stakeholders are. As part of this, think of all the people who are affected by your work, who have influence or power over it, or have an interest in its successful or unsuccessful conclusion.
The table below shows some of the people who might be stakeholders in your job or in your projects:

Your boss	Shareholders	Government
Senior executives	Alliance partners	Trades associations
Your coworkers	Suppliers	The press
Your team	Lenders	Interest groups
Customers	Analysts	The public
Prospective customers	Future recruits	The community
Your family

Remember that although stakeholders may be both organizations and people, ultimately you must communicate with people. Make sure that you identify the correct individual stakeholders within a stakeholder organization.

Step 2 – Prioritize Your Stakeholders

You may now have a long list of people and organizations that are affected by your work. Some of these may have the power either to block or advance. Some may be interested in what you are doing, others may not care.
Map out your stakeholders on a Power/Interest Grid on our free template as shown in figure 1, and classify them by their power over your work and by their interest in your work.

For example, your boss is likely to have high power and influence over your projects and high interest. Your family may have high interest, but are unlikely to have power over it.
Someone's position on the grid shows you the actions you have to take with them:

• High power, interested people: these are the people you must fully engage and make the greatest efforts to satisfy.
• High power, less interested people: put enough work in with these people to keep them satisfied, but not so much that they become bored with your message.
• Low power, interested people: keep these people adequately informed, and talk to them to ensure that no major issues are arising. These people can often be very helpful with the detail of your project.
• Low power, less interested people: again, monitor these people, but do not bore them with excessive communication.

Step 3 – Understand Your Key Stakeholders

You now need to know more about your key stakeholders. You need to know how they are likely to feel about and react to your project. You also need to know how best to engage them in your project and how best to communicate with them.
Key questions that can help you understand your stakeholders are:

• What financial or emotional interest do they have in the outcome of your work? Is it positive or negative?
• What motivates them most of all?
• What information do they want from you?
• How do they want to receive information from you? What is the best way of communicating your message to them?
• What is their current opinion of your work? Is it based on good information?
• Who influences their opinions generally, and who influences their opinion of you? Do some of these influencers therefore become important stakeholders in their own right?
• If they are not likely to be positive, what will win them around to support your project?
• If you don't think you will be able to win them around, how will you manage their opposition?
• Who else might be influenced by their opinions? Do these people become stakeholders in their own right?

A very good way of answering these questions is to talk to your stakeholders directly – people are often quite open about their views, and asking people's opinions is often the first step in building a successful relationship with them.
You can summarize the understanding you have gained on the stakeholder map, so that you can easily see which stakeholders are expected to be blockers or critics, and which stakeholders are likely to be advocates and supporters or your project. A good way of doing this is by color coding: showing advocates and supporters in green, blockers and critics in red, and others who are neutral in orange.

Figure 2 shows an example of this – in this example, you can see that a lot of effort needs to be put into persuading Piers and Michael of the benefits of the project – Janet and Amanda also need to managed well as powerful supporters.

Example:

You can create your own example of Stakeholder Analysis at work – whether for your current role, a job you want to do, or a new project.
Conduct a full Stakeholder Analysis. Ask yourself whether you are communicating as effectively as you should be with your stakeholders. What actions can you take to get more from your supporters or win over your critics?

Key Points

As the work you do and the projects you run become more important, you will affect more and more people. Some of these people have the power to undermine your projects and your position. Others may be strong supporters of your work.
Stakeholder Management is the process by which you identify your key stakeholders and win their support. Stakeholder Analysis is the first stage of this, where you identify and start to understand your most important stakeholders.

The first stage of this is to brainstorm who your stakeholders are. The next step is to prioritize them by power and interest, and to plot this on a Power/Interest grid. The final stage is to get an understanding of what motivates your stakeholders and how you need to win them around.

Business Requirements Analysis

Clearly Agreeing What You're Going to Deliver

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Scrutinizing needs in sufficient detail.

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Every new activity, every new product, every new project in the workplace is created in response to a business need. Yet we often find ourselves in situations where, despite spending tremendous time and resources, there's a mismatch between what has been designed and what is actually needed.
Has a client ever complained that what you delivered isn't what she ordered? Has someone changed his mind altogether about the deliverable, when you were halfway through a project? Have you had conflicting requirements from multiple clients? And have you ever received new requirements just after you thought you'd finished creating a product?
A focused and detailed business requirements analysis can help you avoid problems like these. This is the process of discovering, analyzing, defining, and documenting the requirements that are related to a specific business objective. And it's the process by which you clearly and precisely define the scope of the project, so that you can assess the timescales and resources needed to complete it.
Remember: to get what you want, you need to accurately define it – and a good business requirements analysis helps you achieve this objective. It leads you to better understand the business needs, and helps you break them down into detailed, specific requirements that everyone agrees on. What's more, it's usually much quicker and cheaper to fix a problem or misunderstanding at the analysis stage than it is when the "finished product" is delivered.

Tip:
Many organizations already have established procedures and methodologies for conducting business requirements analyses, which may have been optimized specifically for that organization or industry. If these exist, use them! However, do make sure you also consider the points below.

How to Use the Tool

Below is a five-step guide to conducting your own business requirements analysis.

Step 1: Identify Key Stakeholders

Identify the key people who will be affected by the project. Start by clarifying exactly who the project's sponsor is. This may be an internal or external client. Either way, it is essential that you know who has the final say on what will be included in the project's scope, and what won't.
Then, identify who will use the solution, product, or service. These are your end-users. Your project is intended to meet their needs, so you must consider their inputs.

Tip:
Make sure that your list is complete: remember, end-users for a product or service might all be in one division or department, or they might be spread across various departments or levels of your organization. Our article on Stakeholder Analysis will help you identify stakeholders.

Step 2: Capture Stakeholder Requirements

Ask each of these key stakeholders, or groups of stakeholders, for their requirements from the new product or service. What do they want and expect from this project?

Tip 1:
Remember, each person considers the project from his or her individual perspective. You must understand these different perspectives and gather the different requirements to build a complete picture of what the project should achieve.

Tip 2:
When interviewing stakeholders, be clear about what the basic scope of the project is, and keep your discussions within this. Otherwise, end-users may be tempted to describe all sorts of functionality that your project was never designed to provide. If users have articulated these desires in detail, they may be disappointed when they are not included in the final specification.

You can use several methods to understand and capture these requirements. Here, we give you four techniques:

• Technique 1: Using stakeholder interviews
  Talk with each stakeholder or end-user individually. This allows you to understand each person's specific views and needs.
• Technique 2: Using joint interviews or focus groups
  Conduct group workshops. This helps you understand how information flows between different divisions or departments, and ensure that hand-overs will be managed smoothly.

Tip:
When using these two methods, it's a good idea to keep asking "Why?" for each requirement. This may help you eliminate unwanted or unnecessary requirements, so you can develop a list of the most critical issues.

• Technique 3: Using "use cases"
  This scenario-based technique lets you walk through the whole system or process, step by step, as a user. It helps you understand how the system or service would work. This is a very good technique for gathering functional requirements, but you may need multiple "use cases" to understand the functionality of the whole system.

Tip:
You might want to find existing use cases for similar types of systems or services. You can use these as a starting point for developing your own use case.

• Technique 4: Building Prototypes
  Build a mock-up or model of the system or product to give users an idea of what the final product will look like. Using this, users can address feasibility issues, and they can help identify any inconsistencies and problems.

You can use one or more of the above techniques to gather all of the requirements. For example, when you have a complete list of requirements after your interviews, you can then build a prototype of the system or product.

Step 3: Categorize Requirements

To make analysis easier, consider grouping the requirements into these four categories:

• Functional Requirements – These define how a product/service/solution should function from the end-user's perspective. They describe the features and functions with which the end-user will interact directly.
• Operational Requirements – These define operations that must be carried out in the background to keep the product or process functioning over a period of time.
• Technical Requirements – These define the technical issues that must be considered to successfully implement the process or create the product.
• Transitional Requirements – These are the steps needed to implement the new product or process smoothly.

Step 4: Interpret and Record Requirements

Once you have gathered and categorized all of the requirements, determine which requirements are achievable, and how the system or product can deliver them.
To interpret the requirements, do the following:

• Define requirements precisely – Ensure that the requirements are:
  
  • Not ambiguous or vague.
  • Clearly worded.
  • Sufficiently detailed so that everything is known. (Project over-runs and problems usually come from unknowns that were not identified, or sufficiently well-analyzed.)
  • Related to the business needs.
  • Listed in sufficient detail to create a working system or product design.
• Prioritize requirements – Although many requirements are important, some are more important than others, and budgets are usually limited. Therefore, identify which requirements are the most critical, and which are "nice-to-haves".
• Analyze the impact of change – carry out an Impact Analysis to make sure that you understand fully the consequences your project will have for existing processes, products and people.
• Resolve conflicting issues – Sit down with the key stakeholders and resolve any conflicting requirements issues. You may find Scenario Analysis helpful in doing this, as it will allow all those involved to explore how the proposed project would work in different possible "futures".
• Analyze feasibility – Determine how reliable and easy-to-use the new product or system will be. A detailed analysis can help identify any major problems.

Once everything is analyzed, present your key results and a detailed report of the business needs. This should be a written document.
Circulate this document among the key stakeholders, end-users, and development teams, with a realistic deadline for feedback. This can help resolve any remaining stakeholder conflicts, and can form part of a "contract" or agreement between you and the stakeholders.

Step 5: Sign Off

Finally, make sure you get the signed agreement of key stakeholders, or representatives of key stakeholder groups, saying that the requirements as presented precisely reflect their needs. This formal commitment will play an important part in ensuring that the project does not suffer from "scope creep" later on.

Key Points

The key to a successful business requirements analysis is identifying what the new system or product will do for all appropriate end-users/stakeholders – and to understand what they WANT the new system or product to do.
You can use various techniques to gather requirements, but make sure those requirements are clear, concise, and related to the business. This process also helps you identify and resolve any conflicting requirements issues early on.

Once you complete your analysis, record it in a written document. This becomes the "contract" for creating the product or system that addresses all the needs of your business or your client.