Stakeholder Analysis: People > Tools

 

"If your improvement project fails, it won’t be because you don’t know enough math; it will be because you don’t know enough about people.” 

Early in my engineering career, I got a promotion and was transferred to a production facility, tasked with developing and implementing a new quality improvement program. I worked hard to develop an improvement paradigm that incorporated data-driven decision making, quality teams and process improvement projects. (This was before Six Sigma was a thing, imagine that.)

Our first improvement project was to reduce packaging defects for our highest volume product. I invited the line supervisor, the process engineer, the department manager, the maintenance associate, and a seasoned line operator to a kick-off meeting. 

After presenting a run chart showing an uptick in defects, and a Pareto diagram showing the main types of packaging errors, I kicked off a team brainstorming session.

So far, so good.

I grabbed a dry erase marker and positioned myself at the whiteboard, ready to jot down the group's ideas. The line operator ─ let's call her Martha ─ had 25 years of experience at the factory. Turns out, she also had built up 25 years of resentment against management. Martha was finally invited to a meeting, and here I was, reaching out for her opinion. Well, the flood gates opened. A torrent of invective was released upon the process engineer sitting right next to her, upon the stunned department manager positioned across the table, upon the plant manager who wasn't even in the meeting, and on and on. You get the idea. 

There I stood, holding my marker, completely blindsided by events. I had lost control of the meeting, certainly, but I also had inadvertently introduced a toxic culture onto the team. The meeting ended right there. I had a sit-down with Martha afterwards, where I learned that ten years prior, a "quality initiative" was used to reduce staff and impose what she considered onerous new rules. Some of her friends had been laid off, including one who had just bought a house and had new baby at home.

Management had issues too

Martha was not alone in her discontent. The managers brought their own obstructionist baggage to the team meetings as well. I was new to the organization, so I didn't have the office politics all figured out. I had an inkling that there was some distrust among the department managers and the plant manager. But I underestimated its intensity.

The packaging department manager felt resentful that his department was being targeted for the first improvement project. As a result, he spent valuable time in team meetings pointing out that other departments that had just as bad or even worse quality problems. The team’s requests for defect data and maintenance records were always slow in coming, and they were incomplete when they arrived. 

So, what happened with the packaging project? 

I'll admit to you, the project wasn't a success. The team fizzled out, and the process engineer wound up implementing a few “band-aid” solutions on the machines before he got pulled onto another project.

People > Tools

I had spent my time in an undergraduate engineering program learning heat transfer, strength of materials, calculus, statistics, and floor layout. But what I really needed to be a successful engineer was to learn how to deal with people.

The point of the story is this: the Basic 7 quality tools are amazing, but they can’t do their magic if people on the team are fearful of change or if they distrust each other. 

Stakeholder Analysis

There would have been much more positive project outcome if I had spent the time to complete a stakeholder analysis. Working with a project sponsor who knew the politics of the plant, I could have anticipated the pushback from the people affected, and then developed a behavior approach for each stakeholder and scoped out a communication plan.

Remember, if your improvement project fails, it won’t be because you don’t know enough math; it will be because you don’t know enough about people.

Check out our Stakeholder Analysis mini-course to start practicing People >  Tools.