Chapter 11: Five Ways to Influence People to Cooperate with Your Six Sigma Project

Reality Check

It’s not always easy to identify all of the stakeholders for a Six Sigma project. We once worked with a project team that identified the consolidation of all monthly reporting into a single report as an improvement. The team quickly identified the more obvious stakeholders: MIS, the administrative assistants who provided the raw data, the recipients of the report. However, as the team worked through the Checklist: Potential Project Stakeholders, they began to see some real issues. The administrative assistants may have delivered the raw data, but they didn’t originate it. Likewise, the recipients of the various reports weren’t necessarily the people who used them. It took considerable effort to find out who actually generated and used the data.

The team also found that each of the departments had its own format for reports. The team members initially assumed that the reason for this was just pride of authorship. But in the course of using the Worksheet: Project Stakeholder Analysis, they came to recognize that the department heads with budget authority had a very clear interest in getting credit for revenue and/or not being charged with expenses. It was this interest that drove the departments to customize reports into forms that would help them do this in a quick and easy way. Had they not recognized this concern, the team would have been focused on ways of getting the department heads to give up their pride of authorship. Instead, they identified on their Worksheet: Project Stakeholder Planning the need to ensure that these stakeholders were still able to monitor revenue and expenses.

Early on, the team had identified the CFO, the team sponsor, as a strong supporter of the project. However, as the project progressed, it became apparent that there were serious problems with how the numbers were rolled up from the different reports and that revenue was significantly overstated. The CFO might be embarrassed or worse by the team’s discovery, so they needed to reevaluate the strength of support they could expect from the CFO. Had the team simply forged ahead, it was highly likely that the CFO would not have continued to support them ... and they would have been blindsided by what appeared to be a change of heart. But by revisiting the various worksheets, the team was able to identify a potential change in this stakeholder’s level of support and to adjust their approach accordingly.