Stakeholder management: A view from BSG (Africa)

"Stakeholder management is part of the softer management skills set and should be planned to run in parallel with developing and building a solution - you not only have to create an effective solution, you also need to ensure that you address all actions required to obtain ownership and commitment from the business, so as to make it sustainable within the organisation," says Jurie Schoeman, Head of Programme Management, BSG (Africa).

The term 'stakeholder management' is about understanding stakeholders' expectations, their levels of influence in relation to a change and how these can be managed so that the least resistance to the change is encountered, while still meeting programme expectations.

A stakeholder is anyone who is involved in, impacted by or affected by a change. Depending on the size of the change initiative (and whether this is a project or programme), there are usually a large number of stakeholders involved from a wide variety of different stakeholder groups, ranging from key executives down to operational end-users.

Jurie Schoeman, Head of Programme Management, BSG (Africa), says there are several key components of effective stakeholder management:

* Identifying all of the stakeholders within a change initiative
* Understanding their expectations
* Defining their degree of influence and attitude to the change
* Planning the specific actions that need to be taken with each stakeholder group to manage their expectations

He says different strategies are applicable to different stakeholder groups, as stakeholders at different levels require different sets of information in order to meet their expectations. Stakeholders at an executive level, for example, typically request and endorse the change while giving it their full support. Due to the personal commitment they have given to the change, their credibility is tied directly to the success of the programme and therefore they need regular evidence that the programme is on track to deliver the intended benefits.

Managing them involves ensuring their support and endorsement of the change is retained by supplying consistent information in terms of progress and status and by escalating important decisions regarding issues and risks to them.

The programme team themselves are concerned with knowing what their role entails in terms of contributing to the overall programme plan. It is BSG's belief that managing the programme team effectively, by ensuring that all members of the team clearly understand their role and responsibilities, significantly contributes to the overall success of the programme.

The business users who will be directly impacted by the changes need to have an overall understanding of the change and why it is being done - this must emphasise the benefits of the change, to them personally as well as to the overall organisation. They also want to be confident that they are going to be able to operate effectively once the change is implemented. Therefore managing these stakeholders requires acquiring and retaining their buy-in to the change through positive communication and by training them in the aspects of their roles that will change as a result of the programme.

Schoeman has recently been involved in a major compliance programme at a large global bank, and believes that stakeholder management played a fundamental role in successfully completing the programme while managing the organisation's resistance to the changes introduced.

Banking organisations are often required to comply with a number of regulations and governance requirements depending on their scope of operations. As a global banking group, the bank is required to deal with such regulations at three distinct levels viz. international regulations, national regulations and various internal group regulations. In order to achieve consistent levels of compliance with international regulations across the Group, the bank published a Group Policy on Sanctions and Prohibition of Business Activities.

This is a set of requirements that encapsulate international regulations defined by the US Treasury, EU, UN and the Bank of England (BOE) that are specifically intended to reduce risk across the banking industry by identifying countries, organisations and individuals who are known to have ties to criminal activities (specifically drug trafficking, money laundering or terrorist activities). Banks are prohibited from initiating or maintaining relationships with these individuals or entities, or they may face a range of penalties that include fines, loss of banking licences and criminal charges against senior executives. These regulations are also intended to exert political pressure to influence regimes such as Myanmar, Cuba and Iran.

BSG was contracted by the client to achieve compliance with the policy within the bank's emerging market area of operations. BSG uses the MSP (Managing Successful Programmes) methodology to manage programmes and this methodology was used extensively to plan and guide the programme.

At the very outset of the programme, BSG performed initial analysis and identified three key programme risks:

1. The responsibilities between the various UK teams, the local programme team (that BSG was part of) and the in-country stakeholders [1] were very poorly defined.

2. The flow of information between the various stakeholder groups (UK, SA and in-country stakeholders) was also poorly defined with inconsistent information being disseminated that resulted in confusion and misunderstanding.

3. Lack of understanding of the African banking context by the UK Group stakeholders, particularly concerning the daily operational realities within African countries.

BSG identified stakeholder management as the key mitigating factor for these risks and as such defined a comprehensive stakeholder management plan which was subsequently followed and actioned in parallel with the business analysis activities:

* BSG crafted a detailed change management plan, based on the stakeholder analysis, that was designed to ensure that communications from the SA team to the UK and to the in-country stakeholders was delivered regularly, accurately and in a consistent fashion.

* The team planned and conducted visits to each of the countries within emerging markets to specifically meet with key in-country stakeholders so as to establish a basis for meeting the programme's requirements. The visits were primarily used to complete detailed process mapping and other business analysis work in each country, but the face-to-face interactions with stakeholders were identified as pivotal relationship building activities.

On why relationship building is vital for effective stakeholder management, Schoeman states: "personal interaction allows you to establish relationships with the people who will eventually be directly impacted by the changes introduced - these are the people who know the business inside out and understand all the constraints and challenges within their environment. Their involvement and feedback is crucial not only in designing an effective solution, but also in obtaining commitment and buy-in from the business users. Effective relationships in the business areas formed the basis that made all future work possible. Specifically with this programme, it allowed BSG to gather specific information regarding systems, processes, constraints and challenges in each country and provided us with a team of committed individuals in each country who were prepared to 'champion' the cause of the programme in the face of reluctant users or disgruntled business people. They played a major role in translating the high-level requirements into effective business activities."

BSG faced a few geographical and logistical challenges on the Sanctions Programme and this further necessitated the need for proper stakeholder management. These were:

* Geographical spread
The stakeholders in this programme were spread across 14 countries, three continents and six time zones. This caused a number of issues from a communication perspective, including working time (local time versus UK time), cultural differences (UAE and Egypt have their weekend on Friday and Saturday) and setting up meetings and visits (visas, flights). BSG believes that the basis of successful stakeholder management is a sound communication plan which defines the stakeholders in terms of their responsibilities and expectations and that takes into account communication requirements and constraints. The communication plan developed for the Sanctions Programme dealt with each stakeholder level individually and at a country level where relevant. Progress reports, teleconferencing and newsletters formed key pieces of communication that assisted in managing expectations, risks and delivery. These communications were delivered regularly and consistently, and had to take into account practical limitations (such as bandwidth limits to Africa).

* Relocation of the bank's Emerging Markets Cluster Head Office
During the course of the programme, the bank restructured the previous Africa and Indian Ocean business unit, incorporating this into the Emerging Markets business cluster. With the restructuring, the regional office was moved from Johannesburg to Dubai in April 2007. This meant changes to the programme stakeholders and reporting lines. Scope was also extended to add Egypt, India and the UAE to the existing set of the bank's Africa and Indian Ocean countries and the stakeholder map had to be expanded to include the new stakeholders.

* UK understanding of the African banking environment
Schoeman states that a greater challenge than the geographical distance between the stakeholders was the lack of understanding of the practical realities of what operating in Africa entails. The UK group stakeholders had not visited the 'Emerging Market' countries and did not understand the African working environment. They expected that a branch in Ghana had the same infrastructure and the same resources and skills set amongst the people in the country as a branch in the UK. The visits that BSG conducted in each country identified these differences and allowed BSG to manage the UK Group Programme team's expectations with regard to these. This helped in maintaining feasible milestone schedules and in communicating realistic requirements to the in-country resources. This which in turn played a big role in ensuring that messages were clearly understood and resulted in the cluster and all countries meeting their deadlines and completing the programme activities on schedule.

* Business As Usual (BAU)
Due to the huge growth across most of the emerging market countries, these countries tend to be very under-resourced, with staff operating consistently at full or near full capacity, leaving them with very little time to devote to project activities. Business As Usual (BAU) activities must be their priority, so this had to be borne in mind as an additional constraint to implementing change. BSG managed this constraint by grouping together communications and requirements. Testing and training activities were also grouped according to specific release dates and this helped use in-country resources more efficiently. This helped shape BSG's communication, training and change release plans to minimise the disruption to their daily working schedules.

As the staff in-country did not have the free time available to sit in long training sessions or workshops, BSG believed that the best method to deal with this was to design training and communication in a way that allowed simple messages to be sent in-country. Training had to be designed in a way that could be distributed effectively within the various countries and in some cases training was planned so that the BSG team members travelled to outlying areas to meet with Branch staff and personally deliver the training.

"There is a history of failed IT programmes where the solution design, build and implementation were done perfectly but user expectations were not considered at all. In such cases, changes were implemented but the users were terrified of using the new process or system which was then ignored, or users were provided with insufficient or ineffective training that resulted in disastrous results", says Schoeman.

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. Regarding the Sanctions Programme, he adds, "without stakeholder management, the programme would not have failed 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."

[1] The scope of the programme required changes to be implemented across the bank's Emerging Market Cluster. This cluster is made up of Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritius, Seychelles, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Egypt, India and the UAE.