Let the professionals handle it: a guide to stakeholder management

I heard a web business owner the other day say – after dialog with some disgruntled business-side execs – that the web has gone mainstream enough so that it can no longer be managed in isolation by the ‘e’ folks. While there has to be allowance for channel expertise to assert itself, the business is the ‘business owner’ of a project or property and as such should have the right to deep involvement.

While it’s hard to object in theory to something that sounds so rational, the devil is in the details.

1. Black box – it may be that in many companies, the web groups started across a great divide and danced to their own music, resulting in final products mis-aligned to the business needs behind their existence. Clearly, this approach suffered from a dearth of involvement by the business.

2. Everyone’s an expert – at the other end of the spectrum lies the scenario where business owners with little to no web experience are assigned leadership roles or assume them under the aegis of business ownership. If they’re accountable, they want a say. I and anyone who’s ever worked in an agency or been accountable to internal clients has seen this go wrong – from mitigated success to outright catastrophe, often in direct proportion to degree of micro-involvement by the business.

So what’s the answer? Let’s look first at the question of who should act as ‘business manager’ of a web project. First of all, such a person needs to be directly accountable to the goals driving the project in the first place. But now consider the question of subject matter expertise and experience. I’ve said before how fragile and risky any major project is, and one of the only ways to offset those risks is to empower leadership that is intimately familiar with the pitfalls and knows how to avoid them.

This happens through enforcement of best practices, discipline, expert interpretation of day-to-day challenges, and empowerment of experts within the team. In the absence of this leadership, best practices go ignored, deadlines are missed (these come back to haunt later), expert advice gets trumped, and bad decisions made. Added together, this
cavalcade of mis-steps may not prevent the launch from happening, but it will definitely detract heavily from the potential success and may result in lateness, buggy or inconsistent launches, and budget over-runs that can cost the business big time.

Think of it this way: if a huge hurricane’s about smash into a major city, do you want the guy who ran some horse association or a serious professional operator who’s managed ground operations in catastrophes before and knows the ropes? With the money at stake in cost and potential benefit, would you really want any less for your projects?

So what about that validity to the business-side involvement I mentioned? Let’s call these folks ‘stakeholders.’ The answer is that expert project leadership knows how to involve business stakeholders appropriately to ensure alignment but mitigate micro-meddling to reach the best result. This would involve deep immersion in business objectives and review/sign-off on documentation at key intervals along the way. This way, the business has knowledge of progress and a voice in decisions.

But what happens when leadership and the business disagree? This is where the senior management of development has to lay the foundations for success and prevent deadlock or the wrong POV winning such a debate. Forrester did a paper (You get the Site you Deserve: 2001) a few years back that lays out the answer. A project needs a senior sponsor who backs the project leaders empowerment to make final calls. Without this layer and senioirity of support, the whole system collapses.

In every case, good project leadership should attempt to build a relationship on trust with their business clients. But the relationship can be greatly facilitated by making the lead accountable to the business goals AND by establishing the lead’s authority at the outset. Agencies have a much more difficult time at this than internal internet groups, but the same applies to the internal agency manager – make sure this person is an expert and empower them to do things right. It will definitely show up in the bottom line.