Stakeholders Engagement: Pros And Cons

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Stakeholders are able to gather individuals who can generate capital investments in order to secure growth of the business for long time. They have a great interest in how the project turns out, whether it succeeds or fails. There are both benefits and disadvantages of stakeholder engagement in IT projects for businesses.

Some of the advantages stakeholders possesses are as follows;

  • Business experience: These individuals are mostly board directors, who do not necessarily play a crucial role in the daily operations of a business, but also provide a big picture of project, set goals for long-term success, and help the company to avoid costly mistakes. Moreover, they offer mentoring advice and directs the company to grow properly and avoid making costly mistakes along the way.
  • Business acumen: Stakeholders always try to look ahead 3 or 5 years along the way. Few times a company some people who knows how to deal with a situation happening in the here and now.
  • Anticipate Potential Problems: Stakeholders make business owner anticipate things that could go wrong. Thats the reason some businesses owners bring an accountant or attorney among the board of directors so that they foresee potential legal or financial issues. Additionally, stakeholder has experience with a potential vendor the company needs who could provide valuable testimony to working with the vendor.
  • Ensuring transparency and accountability: The review process is described as a critical aspect of ensuring transparency and accountability by engaging stakeholders, especially in situations where systematic reviews determine policy.
  • Enhancing quality: It is essential that involvement of stakeholders will improve the overall quality of the review. The reviewers and program officials have found a number of specific areas where stakeholder inputs improved the overall scientific quality of the final report that includes: 1) defining the critical questions and framing the review. 2) Refine the scope of the review by helping the team.

Mostly stakeholders contribute to the success of a business, sometimes can have adverse impact on operations for a variety of reasons:

  • Representing Own Interests: Sometimes, stakeholders focus on their own interests. This is common but not entirely exclusive to external stakeholders. They focus on their own financial needs and not on the needs of the business. This will result in blocking progress of a company when external stakeholders fear that a business’ actions will harm their interests.
  • Looking out for number one: Often sometimes stakeholders place their own interests above those of the business they support. Whenever there is intersection of money and power intersect, board directors can make or force decisions to protect their own pocketbooks.
  • Fearing Failure: It is a result of lack of effective communication where board officials and concerned people dont keep abreast of developments, thereby creating a lack of control over important decisions and limits the responsibilities and power of interests.
  • Training and resources: Apart from extra time involved, a lack of proper training and resources also limit the benefits of stakeholder engagement.
  • Deep Research: Extensive research is needed to find whether the findings apply to projects from non-IT organizations.

In conclusion, managing stakeholders is important to the overall success of a business same like managing its assets. Active stakeholders engagement can prevent problems before they occur.

References

  1. Majchrzak, A., More, P. H. B., and Faraj, S. 2012. Transcending Knowledge Differences in Cross-Functional Teams, Organization Science (23:4), pp. 951-970.
  2. Cottrell E, Whitlock E, Kato E, et al. Defining the Benefits of Stakeholder Engagement in Systematic Reviews. Research White Paper. [Prepared by the Scientific Resource Center under Contract No 290-2012-00004-C]; Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality; 2014. Available from: http://effectivehealthcare.ahrq.gov/ehc/products/581/1883/stakeholderengagement-benefits-report-140318.pdf. Accessed March 1, 2014.
  3. Initial National Priorities for Comparative Effectiveness Research. Institute of Medicine of the National Academies; 2009. Available from: http://www.iom.edu/
  4. Boote J, Barber R, Cooper C. Principles and indicators of successful consumer involvement in NHS research: results of a Delphi study and subgroup analysis. Health policy (Amsterdam, Netherlands). 2006;75(3):280297.
  5. Public Involvement in Systematic Reviews: Supplement to the Briefing Notes for Researchers. INVOLVE; National Institute for Health Research; National Health Service; 2012. Available from: http://www. invo.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/INVOLVEPublicInvolvemen tSystematicReviews2012.pdf. Accessed March 1, 2013.

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