The Stakeholder Who Was Never in the Room
You are the PM for a warehouse management system rollout across four sites. The communications plan identifies the operations directors at each site as the key stakeholders; they have attended every steering meeting and signed off on each design milestone. In week 18, two weeks before pilot go-live at Site 3, the site's shift supervisors escalate directly to the COO: they were never consulted, the new picking workflow adds roughly 90 seconds per order, and their teams are threatening to refuse to use it. The COO calls you demanding to know why frontline staff were 'blindsided.' Your plan shows no supervisor engagement activities. The design was approved by directors who do not work the floor.
1. Diagnose what went wrong and assess the immediate risk.
Read the worked answer
The stakeholder analysis was structurally incomplete. It mapped the formal hierarchy (directors) and missed the operational influencers (shift supervisors) who control whether the workflow is actually adopted. Directors can approve a design; supervisors determine whether it survives contact with the floor.
Immediate risk: a pilot go-live in two weeks with an active refusal threat from the people who will run the system. That is a high-probability adoption failure, and the 90-second-per-order figure is a real operational cost the design never priced. If supervisors refuse, the pilot produces no usable data and the rollout credibility is damaged across all four sites.
Root cause: the communications plan treated sign-off as engagement. Approval from people who do not perform the work is not validation of the work.
2. What do you do in the two weeks before go-live?
Read the worked answer
Do not proceed with the pilot as scheduled. Two weeks is enough to engage, not enough to redesign - so separate the two.
Week 1:
- Meet the Site 3 supervisors in person, within 48 hours. Listen first; get the 90-second figure broken down by step so you know whether it is the workflow, the training, or the hardware.
- Convene a joint session with supervisors and the operations director to validate the workflow against actual floor practice.
- Update the stakeholder register and communications plan to include supervisors at all four sites, with a named engagement owner.
Week 2:
- If the 90-second cost is a design flaw, scope a fix and reset the pilot date with a stated new date. If it is a training gap, run supervisor-led training before go-live.
- Brief the COO with the diagnosis, the corrected plan, and the revised date - own the gap rather than blaming the directors.
Then apply the corrected stakeholder approach to Sites 1, 2, and 4 before their go-lives.