The Stakeholder Who Was Never Consulted
A mid-sized logistics firm is planning a warehouse management system replacement. The project manager has run workshops with operations managers, IT, and finance, and the requirements baseline is signed off. Two weeks before design freeze, a union representative writes to say that pickers were never consulted and that the new handheld scanning workflow changes their task times and could affect an incentive pay scheme. The pickers are 180 of the firm's 400 staff. The PM checks the stakeholder register and finds pickers listed only as 'end users - inform'. The sponsor wants to proceed to design freeze on schedule, arguing the workflow was approved by operations managers who supervise pickers.
1. Assess the stakeholder analysis failure and its likely consequences if design freeze proceeds.
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The register classified pickers as 'inform' when their work, pay, and daily tasks are directly changed by the system. That is a misclassification of influence and interest: the group has high interest (their tasks and earnings change) and high practical influence (they can slow adoption, raise grievances, or refuse to use the workflow). Relying on managers as proxies assumes managers know what pickers do and want, which the union letter directly contradicts.
Consequences of proceeding: requirements discovered late are far more expensive to change after design freeze; the incentive scheme interaction is a pay dispute, not a technical defect, and can trigger formal grievance or industrial action; and adoption risk rises because the people expected to use the handhelds had no part in shaping them. The schedule saving is illusory if the design later has to be reworked or the rollout stalls.
2. Recommend a concrete plan to recover before design freeze, naming sequencing and what must be decided by whom.
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Recover in three steps. First, engage immediately: meet the union rep and a representative sample of pickers within days, before freeze, and treat the incentive-pay question as a separate track with HR and finance, since it may need a policy decision rather than a system change. Second, re-baseline the register: reclassify pickers as high interest/high influence with a named engagement owner, and add the union as a distinct stakeholder. Third, run a short workflow validation with pickers on the scanning steps and task times, feeding results into design before freeze.
Decisions must be assigned: the sponsor owns whether to move the freeze date; operations owns workflow design changes; HR and finance own the incentive-scheme impact. If the validation cannot complete before freeze, freeze the stable 80% and hold the scanning workflow as a controlled open item with a dated decision. Proceeding silently is the one option to reject.