Ensuring success through effective stakeholder management

The program team faced a number of geographic and logistical challenges:

-Program stakeholders were spread across 14 countries, three continents and six time zones, which resulted in numerous difficulties, including working time (local time vs. UK time), cultural differences (in the UAE and Egypt, a workweek runs from Sunday to Thursday) and difficulty setting up meetings and visits. - During the course of the programme, the bank restructured its Africa and Indian Ocean business unit, incorporating it into the Emerging Markets business cluster, which resulted in the regional office being moved from Johannesburg to Dubai. This meant changes to programme stakeholders and reporting lines as well as an extension in scope to include Egypt, India and the UAE - The UK office lacked the necessary understanding of the complexities of the practical realities of operations in Africa and expected branches in the emerging markets to have the same infrastructure and resources as a branch in the UK - The sector growth across most of the emerging market countries means they are largely under-resourced, with staff operating consistently at full or near-full capacity. This means they have very little time to devote to project activities, as Business As Usual (BAU) activities must be their priority. Through the creation of a sound communication plan, which defined stakeholders in terms of their responsibilities and expectations, taking into account communication requirements and constraints, the programme team was able to effectively manage the expectations of key stakeholders. By dealing with each stakeholder level individually, and at country-level, the communications plan, through regular and consistent communications, ensured expectations, risks and delivery were all successfully managed. Expansion of the stakeholder map and communications plan mitigated the impact of the restructuring of the Africa and Indian Ocean business unit. The programme team conducted visits to each country identified in the scope of the project, which enabled the team to proactively identify the disparities between operations in each country and those of the UK. This allowed the team to manage the expectations of the UK Group Programme team and helped maintain feasible milestone schedules and communication of realistic requirements to in-country teams. BSG managed the BAU requirements by grouping together communications requirements. Testing and training activities were grouped according to release dates, which helped shape the training and change release plans, minimising disruption to BAU. As the staff in-country did not have the free time available to sit in long training sessions or workshops, BSG designed the training and accompanying communications so it could be effectively distributed within the various countries. Making a difference BSG believes that stakeholder management alone will not define whether a programme will be a success or a failure, but that effective stakeholder management enhances the success of a programme by reducing the amount of resistance to the future change. Without stakeholder management, the Sanctions Programme would not have delivered in terms of delivering capability in the form of compliant systems and processes, but would have been a complete disaster in terms of the effective use of these. Thus the programme would not have met the overall objectives of achieving compliance without adversely affecting normal business processes. Awareness, buy-in to the change and ownership of the solution by business were all achieved through effective stakeholder management and were critical to succeeding in implementing a compliant and sustainable solution that supported the business.

what are the six key points of the communications plan in the stakeholder management that have been demonstrated in this case study.?