breakout session overview
Every organization
must communicate in order to survive and succeed. Its processes,
development, marketing, production all involve communication. Every
organization has customers – how the customers respond to the organization
and how the employees work within the organization to produce the goods and
services is also about communication. Many organizations do not recognise
the importance of communication to their success and therefore do not value
communication and the associated stakeholder relationship management, and so
do not provide sufficient encouragement to employees to spend enough time on
these vital functions. This paper attempts to raise the profile of
communication and stakeholders within organizations by showing the
connection between the organization’s success and a culture of stakeholder
relationship management, using the measures of the ‘zero cost of quality’
inherent in the quality movement.
The concept discussed in this paper is based on the
philosophy of the Quality movement that quality is free – investment in
stakeholders is balanced by reduction in ‘failure dollars’ of fixing the
issues caused by poor stakeholder relationship management. A case study of
the strategies and events before, after and during the Gulf of Mexico oil
spill analyses the issues of that disaster to establish a framework for
adding value to an organization through more effective and sustainable
stakeholder relationship management.
The PMO is ideally placed to champion and facilitate this approach and provide not only support services to achieve this, but also assist in measuring ‘failure dollars’ through its reporting mechanisms. The PMO should lead by example in using structured effective stakeholder engagement practices to manage its own stakeholder community and also to assist the other parts of the organization to move towards ‘stakeholder engagement is free’.
Lynda Bourne DPM, PMP, FAIM is a senior management consultant, trainer and an award winning project manager with 25 years professional industry experience. She is the CEO and Managing Director of Stakeholder Management Pty Ltd and Director of Professional Services with Mosaic Project Services Pty Ltd focusing on the delivery of OPM3, stakeholder management and other project related consultancy, mentoring and training for clients world-wide including PgMP, PMP and CAPM accreditation courses.
Lynda is a recognized international author, seminar leader and speaker on the topic of stakeholder management and the ‘Stakeholder Circle’ visualization tool. She has presented at conferences and seminars in Europe, Russia, Asia, New Zealand and Australia to audiences of project managers in the IT, construction, defense and mining industries and has been key speaker at meetings and workshops conducted by PMI as well as Project Management communities of practice within organizations in the finance and utilities sector.
Lynda has extensive experience as a Senior Project Manager specializing in delivery of IT and other business-related projects within the telecommunications sector. She has worked as a Senior IT Project Management Consultant with various Telcos in Australia and South East Asia including senior roles with Optus and Telstra. Other industry-related roles include strategic planning, Account Management within the IT industry, Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) and business development.
