IN THIS CHAPTER

Compiling an audience list

Identifying drivers, supporters, and observers

Using an effective format

Determining who has authority in your project

Prioritizing your audiences

Often a project is like an iceberg: Nine-tenths of it lurks below the surface. You receive an assignment and think you know what it entails and who needs to be involved. Then, as the project unfolds, new people emerge who may affect your goals, approach, and chances for project success.

You risk compromising your project in the following two ways when you don’t involve key people or groups in your project in a timely manner:

• You may miss important information that can affect the project’s performance and ultimate success.
• You may insult people. And you can be sure that when people feel that you have slighted or insulted them, they will take steps to make sure you don’t do it again!

As soon as you begin to think about a new project, start to identify people who may play a role. This chapter shows you how to identify these candidates; how to decide whether, when, and how to involve them; and how to determine who has the authority, power, and interest to make critical decisions.

Understanding Your Project’s Audiences

A project audience is any person or group that supports, is affected by, or is interested in your project. Your project’s audiences can be inside or outside your organization, and knowing who they are helps you

• Plan whether, when, and how to involve them.
• Determine whether the scope of the project is bigger or smaller than you originally anticipated.

You may hear other terms used in the business world to describe project audiences, but these terms address only some of the people from your complete project audience list. Here are some examples:

• A stakeholder list identifies people and groups who support or are affected by your project. The stakeholder list doesn’t usually include people who are merely interested in your project.
• A distribution list identifies people who receive project communications. These lists are often out-of-date for a couple of reasons. Some people remain on the list simply because no one removes them; other people are on the list because no one wants to run the risk of insulting them by removing them. In either case, having their names on this list doesn’t ensure that these people actually support, are affected by, or are interested in your project.
• Team members are people whom the project manager directs. All team members are stakeholders and, as such, are part of the project audience, but the audience list includes more than just team members.

Developing an Audience List

As you identify the different audiences for your project, record them in an audience list. Check out the following sections for information on how to develop this list.

Starting your audience list

A project audience list is a living document. You need to start developing your list as soon as you begin thinking about your project. Write down any names that occur to you; when you discuss your project with other people, ask them who they think may be affected by or interested in your project. Then select a small group of the audiences you identify and conduct a formal brainstorming session. Continue to add and subtract names to your audience list until you can’t think of anyone else.

In the following sections, you discover how to refine your audience list by dividing it into specific categories and recognizing important potential audiences. This section ends with a sample to show you how to put together your own list.

Using specific categories

To increase your chances of identifying all appropriate people, develop your audience list in categories. You’re less likely to overlook people when you consider them department by department or group by group instead of trying to identify everyone from the organization individually at the same time.

Start your audience list by developing a hierarchical grouping of categories that covers the universe of people who may be affected by, be needed to support, or be interested in your project. You might want to start with the following groups:

• Internal: People and groups inside your organization
  • Upper management: Executive-level management responsible for the general oversight of all organization operations
  • Requesters: The person who came up with the idea for your project and all the people through whom the request passed before you received it
  • Project manager: The person with overall responsibility for successfully completing the project
  • End users: People who will use the goods or services the project will produce
  • Team members: People assigned to the project whose work the project manager directs
  • Groups normally involved: Groups typically involved in most projects in the organization, such as the human resources, finance, contracts, and legal departments
  • Groups needed just for this project: Groups or people with special knowledge related to this project
• External: People and groups outside your organization
  • Clients or customers: People or groups that buy or use your organization’s products or services
  • Collaborators: Groups or organizations with which you may pursue joint ventures related to your project
  • Vendors, suppliers, and contractors: Organizations that provide personnel, raw materials, equipment, or other resources required to perform your project’s work
  • Regulators: Government agencies that establish regulations and guidelines that govern some aspect of your project work
  • Professional societies: Groups of professionals that may influence or be interested in your project
  • The public: The local, national, and international community of people who may be affected by or interested in your project

Continue to subdivide these categories further until you arrive at job titles or position descriptions and the names of the people who occupy them. (The process of systematically separating a whole into its component parts is called decomposition, which you can read about in Chapter 4 in this minibook.)

Considering often overlooked audiences

As you develop your audience list, be sure not to overlook the following potential audiences:

• Support groups: These people don’t tell you what you should do (or help you deal with the trauma of project management); instead, they help you accomplish the project’s goals. If support groups know about your project early, they can fit you into their work schedules more readily. They can also tell you information about their capabilities and processes that may influence what your project can accomplish and by when you can do so. Such groups include
  • Facilities
  • Finance
  • Human resources
  • Information technology (IT)
  • Legal services
  • Procurement or contracting
  • Project management office
  • Quality
  • Security

• End users of your project’s products: End users are people or groups who will use the goods and services your project produces. Involving end users at the beginning of and throughout your project helps ensure that the goods and services produced are as easy as possible to implement and use and are most responsive to their true needs. It also confirms that you appreciate the fact that the people who will use a product may have important insights into what it should look like and do, which increases the chances that they’ll work to implement the products successfully.

  In some cases, you may omit end users on your audience list because you don’t know who they are. In other situations, you may think you have taken them into account through liaisons — people who represent the interests of the end users. (Check out the nearby sidebar “Discovering the real end users” for a costly example of what can happen when you depend solely on liaisons.)

• People who will maintain or support the final product: People who will service your project’s final products affect the continuing success of these products. Involving these people throughout your project gives them a chance to make your project’s products easier to maintain and support. It also allows them to become familiar with the products and effectively build their maintenance into existing procedures.

Examining the beginning of a sample audience list

Suppose you’re asked to coordinate your organization’s annual blood drive. Figure 2-1 illustrates some of the groups and people you might include in your project’s audience list as you prepare for your new project.

Considering the Drivers, Supporters, and Observers

After you identify everyone in your project audience, you need to determine which of the following groups those people fall into. Then you can decide whether to involve them and, if so, how and when.

• Drivers: People who have some say in defining the results of your project. You’re performing your project for these people.
• Supporters: The people who help you perform your project. Supporters include individuals who authorize or provide the resources for your project as well as those who work on it.
• Observers: People who are neither drivers nor supporters but who are interested in the activities and results of your project. Observers have no say in your project, and they’re not actively involved in it. However, your project may affect them at some point.

Separating audiences into these three categories helps you decide what information to seek from and share with each audience, as well as to clarify the project decisions in which to involve them.

Suppose an IT group has the job of modifying the layout and content of a monthly sales report for all sales representatives. The vice president of sales requested the project, and the chief information officer (CIO — the boss of the head of the IT group) approved it. As the project manager for this project, consider categorizing your project’s audiences as follows:

• Drivers: The vice president of sales is a driver because he has specific reasons for revising the report. The CIO is a potential driver because she may hope to develop certain new capabilities for her group through this project. Individual sales representatives are all drivers for this project because they’ll use the redesigned report to support their work.
• Supporters: The systems analyst who designs the revised report, the training specialist who trains the users, and the vice president of finance who authorizes the funds for changing the manual are all supporters.
• Observers: The head of the customer service department is a potential observer because he hopes your project will lead to an improved problem-tracking system this year.

Beware of supporters who try to act like drivers. In the preceding example, the analyst who finalizes the content and format of the report may try to include certain items that she thinks are helpful. However, only the real drivers should determine the specific data that goes into the report. The analyst just determines whether including the desired data is possible and what doing so will cost.

Keep in mind that the same person can be both a driver and a supporter. For example, the vice president of sales is a driver for the project to develop a revised monthly sales report but also a supporter if he has to transfer funds from the sales department budget to pay for developing the report.

The following sections help you identify when you need to involve drivers, supporters, and observers, and how to keep them involved.

Displaying Your Audience List

You’re concerned with two issues when developing the format and content of your audience list:

• Increasing your confidence that you identified all appropriate audiences
• Helping others suggest people not on the list who should be included and people on the list who possibly should not

Figure 2-2 shows a sample audience list format you might want to use for your audience list. The format includes three major categories of information:

• The hierarchical structure of the categories in which audiences are located
• The specific identifiers of each audience (job title and name)
• The audience’s role with regard to the project (driver, supporter, or observer; see the earlier section “Considering the Drivers, Supporters, and Observers”)

Note: You can add additional columns on the right for optional information, such as email and phone.

Confirming Your Audience’s Authority

In project terms, authority refers to the overall right to make project decisions that others must follow, including the right to apply project resources, expend funds, or give approvals. Having opinions about how an aspect should be addressed is different from having the authority to decide how it will be addressed. Mistaking a person’s level of authority can lead to frustration as well as wasted time and money.

Confirm that the people you’ve identified as audiences have the authority to make the decisions they need to make to perform their tasks. If they don’t have that authority, find out who does and how to bring those people into the process.

At the beginning of the carrying out the work stage in your projects, take the following steps to define each audience member’s authority:

1. Clarify each audience member’s tasks and decisions.

   Define with each person his tasks and his role in those tasks. For example, will he just work on the task, or will he also approve the schedules, resource expenditures, and work approaches?

2. Ask each audience member what his authority is regarding each decision and task.

   Ask about individual tasks rather than all issues in a particular area. For example, a person can be more confident about his authority to approve supply purchases up to $5,000 than about his authority to approve all equipment purchases, no matter the type or amount.

   Clarify decisions that the audience member can make himself. For decisions needing someone else’s approval, find out whose approval he needs. (Ask, never assume!)

3. Ask each audience member how he knows what authority he has.

   Does a written policy, procedure, or guideline confirm the authority? Did the person’s boss tell him in conversation? Is the person just assuming? If the person has no specific confirming information, encourage him to get it.

4. Check out each audience member’s history of exercising authority.

   Have you or other people worked with this person in the past? Has he been overruled on decisions that he said he was authorized to make? If so, ask him why he believes he won’t be similarly overruled this time.

5. Verify whether anything has recently changed regarding each audience member’s authority.

   Do you have any reason to believe that this person’s authority has changed? Is he new to his current group or position? Has he recently started working for a new boss? If any of these situations exists, encourage the person to find specific documentation to confirm his authority for his benefit as well as yours.

Reconfirm the information in these steps when a particular audience’s decision-making assignments change. Suppose, for example, that you initially expect all individual purchases on your project to be at or under $2,500. Bill, the team representative from the finance group, assures you that he has the authority to approve such purchases for your project without checking with his boss. Midway through the project, you find that you have to purchase a piece of equipment for $5,000. Be sure to verify with Bill that he can personally authorize this larger expenditure. If he can’t, find out whose approval you need and plan how to get it.

Assessing Your Audience’s Power and Interest

An audience’s potential effect on a project depends on the power he or she can exercise and the interest the person has in exercising that power. Assessing the relative levels of each helps you decide with whom you should spend your time and effort to realize the greatest benefits.

Power is a person’s ability to influence the actions of others. This ability can derive either from the direct authority the person has to require people to respond to her requests (ascribed power) or the ability she has to induce others to do what she asks because of the respect they have for her professionally or personally (achieved power). In either case, the more power a person has, the better able she is to marshal people and resources to support your project. Typically, drivers and supporters have higher levels of power over your project than observers do.

On the other hand, a person’s interest in something is how much she cares about it, is curious about it, or pays attention to it. The more interested a person is in your project, the more likely she is to want to use her power to help the project succeed.

You can define an audience’s relative levels of power and interest related to your project as being either high or low. You then have four possible combinations for each audience’s relative levels of power and interest. The particular values of an audience’s power and interest ratings suggest the chances that the audience may have a significant effect on your project and, therefore, the relative importance of keeping that audience interested and involved in your project.

Most often, you base the assessments of an audience’s power over and interest in your project on the aggregated individual, subjective opinions of several parties: you, your team members, your project’s other audiences, people who have worked with the audience on other projects, subject matter experts, the audience himself or herself, or a combination. If you assign a value of 1 to each individual rating of high and 0 to each individual rating of low, you’d rate an audience’s power or interest as high if the average of the individual assessments were 0.5 or greater and low if the average were below 0.5.

Figure 2-3 depicts a power-interest grid, which represents these four possible power-interest combinations as distinct quadrants on a two-dimensional graph.

As the project manager, you should spend a minimal amount of time and effort with audiences who have low levels of both power and interest (quadrant I). Spend increasingly greater amounts of time and effort with audiences that have a low level of power and a high level of interest (quadrant II) and a low level of interest and a high level of power (quadrant III), respectively. You should spend the most time and effort keeping audiences with high degrees of both power and interest (quadrant IV) informed and involved. (Check out Chapter 5 of this minibook for different ways to communicate with your project’s audiences.)