Managing in the Face of Meddling Stakeholders - In House

Managing in the Face of Meddling Stakeholders - In House

This workshop looks at the complex process of gathering requirements from multiple stakeholders. It examines how requirements (functional and non functional) need to be carefully balanced so that one does not overshadow the other. It juxtaposes the project that designed and built Titanic and modern projects, examining the difficulties in managing principal stakeholders and the sponsor through the requirements process. Often they can unwittingly compromise the project by actions taken over requirements.

The shipping company White Star had a mission to meet competitive pressures by launching three new super liners to service transatlantic travel. The fact that White Star developed a new business strategy and embraced an emerging technology underscores the similarities to today’s challenge of rolling out new projects. But as the project team went through the process of gathering and managing requirements, both functional and non functional, compromises were made to this process by naval architects. They were pursuing the sponsor’s project mantra “to create the ultimate passenger (first class) experience.” In fact, inept project management and the inability to control stakeholder meddling allowed major compromises to be made in every project stage — from design to construction, to testing, and right into implementation.

The workshop makes a very strong case that the causes leading to the sinking of Titanic are very similar to reasons why today’s projects fail. In many ways Titanic’s project team should have succeeded because of the attention they paid to risks and minimizing these. For example, by:

• investing in a pilot model to analyze exposure to the possibility of loss and identify risks;
• looking closely at the risks in operation, based on experience, to identify mitigation strategies; and
• employing safety features to reduce risk.