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Whether dealing with original project requirements or those added or modified by sanctioned scope creep, it is paramount that you engage the beneficiary in very carefully managed and documented planning sessions. Exhibit 8 is offered as a script worth following in this regard.
Exhibit 8: Planning Steps with Beneficiaries
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At the start of the chapter, I mentioned the common view that beneficiaries are expected to stand on the sidelines applauding your effort and the naïveté or shortsightedness associated with this expectation. Although you do not want customers or beneficiaries peering over your shoulder or backseat driving if you will, you do want them to have skin in the game. To the degree that you can get their management to commit resources, dollars, and organizational support to your project, your chances of success are enhanced considerably. To the degree that you are unable to leverage their commitment, you are likely to get mired in confusion, obstruction, and a lot of discourse that is counterproductive, to say the least.
To justify this last paragraph, I must resort to the "skin in the game" paradigm which basically states that beneficiaries place value on that which they receive to the degree that they participate in the accomplishment. As an extreme example of this, I recently saw a newspaper story of an heiress suing the trustees of her multibillion-dollar inheritance for unfairly diminishing the value of the trust fund before she was given access upon turning 18 years old. Apparently, the diluted billions she received failed to meet her expectations, and who could blame her for feeling annoyed?
Seriously, it is not easy to engage beneficiaries in the business of contributing to project success, but that should be your expectation and your goal from the start of your project. Engaged beneficiaries:
Make you aware of risk
Accommodate your implementation strategies to the extent possible
Are tolerant of project disruptions to their BAU world
Provide knowledge base, resource, and political cover
May help you with other beneficiary groups as good team players can
May contribute corporate assets in the event of unanticipated obstacles
Unengaged beneficiaries can be counted on to be less than enthusiastic in these and other areas, so your efforts to engage instead of alienate them by what you do or fail to do are clearly significant. Let me warn you that appealing to their sense of corporate loyalty is not going to work for you, although you are welcome to give that a shot. What does work is this carefully orchestrated set of steps outlined a few pages back. If you review the steps, you can see that one result of following the script is that the beneficiary is educated about your implementation strategy. They will obviously immediately start thinking about the ways you can foul up their environment and what needs to happen to indemnify against that. If you give the impression that they should stay out of your way while you do your thing, they have little if any incentive to share that information with you, let alone partner with you to ensure a relatively pain-free implementation.
I believe that most of the ten steps outlined for beneficiary planning are self-evident or are covered elsewhere in this book; however, I do want to discuss three of them at this time. They are numbers three, six, and seven (i.e., roles and responsibilities, the development of a test plan, and service levels, respectively).
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