Project Stakeholder Management

A study has been done that shows just how important your project stakeholder’s expectations can be when they evaluate a product.

The study was done by researchers from the California Institute of Technology and Stanford’s business school, as reported last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, who discovered that the pleasant sensation experienced by people when tasting wine is directly linked to its perceived price, and not to the actual quality of the wine.

They found this by scanning the brains of 20 volunteers who were tasting wine. The volunteers were told that the five wines they were tasting ranged in price from $5 to $90, whereas there were actually only three wines, and two of them were served at different prices.

The researchers found that when the volunteers were told that the higher priced wines were being served to them, more blood and oxygen was sent to a part of the brain called the medial orbitofrontal cortex, whose activity reflects pleasure. The effect was the same regardless of the actual wine served, and was confirmed by follow-up testing that included members of the Stanford University Wine Club.

This does seem to explain how some expensive modern art can attain legendary status among collectors, whilst appearing to be a pile of junk to the uninitiated. The collector, having paid a fortune for the pickled sheep or blank canvas, really does believe it is beautiful.

So we need to be aware of the very powerful effect of marketing and expectations on people’s perceptions, in order to ensure project success.

Link to a CNET News article on the subject and the Stanford news.

Managing the expectations of people from different generations can be a huge challenge, especially in today’s very complex workplaces. Here we look at the general workplace expectations of stakeholders from three distinct generations.

Three generational cultures

‘Baby Boomers’ are now aged between 45 to 59 and occupy many senior management levels. They see their work as being a reflection of their success and expect a strict office hierarchy.

‘Generation X’ are in their 30s and 40s and have a focus on individual branding and lifestyle, valuing technology, family, cultural diversity, education and self-improvement. They will want to be involved in interesting projects in which they can be collaborative and express their creativity.

‘Generation Y’ are in their 20s and have never known a world without technology. They are likely to be entrepreneurs and value free agency over loyalty to one company. They want to be part of a friendly workplace that actively contributes to society and has an environmental awareness, valuing time over money.

In terms of Project Stakeholder Management, very different approaches are required for people in these three groups. For example, ‘Generation Y’ workers may prefer to have a flexible working environment. Both ‘Generation X’ and ‘Generation Y’ workers value collaboration, preferring an open seating arrangement whilst the ‘Baby Boomers’ expect a more formal structure and closed office space.

Project Managers from one generation may be called upon to manage stakeholders from different generations, so they need to adopt a flexible management strategy.

Rapport Building

As in many areas of human relationship management, the best single strategy for managing people from other generations is to build rapport with them. When each age-group understands more about the individual work preferences of the other generations, a win-win situation will develop where all stakeholders are individually valued members of the project team and workforce.