IT Service Management Players mostly need to make decisions in a short period of time, failure to make quick effective decisions will delay solutions being implemented and therefore also customer experience. Involving stakeholders who affect or may be affected by the envisaged decision, sounds onerous, when fast solutions are necessary.
Do we have to Involve Stakeholders? We don't have a choice? If we don't, we may find that our decisions are not supported by critical role players and we may miss out on the following:
- > Important Players' Interests Remain Invisible
- > The Acceptance Level of the Decision may be low
- > Unsupportive parties remain unknown.
In the absence of visible stakeholder interests, we have at best a ‘part’ solution to implement and we will not know if we some critical support we need will not be forthcoming. We may also get some nasty surprises in future when the unsupportive stakeholders surface and start to resurrect the ‘dead cows’ of old solo decisions. How do you then: 1) Identify and 2) Analyze stakeholders?
It is not feasible to involve all key players when Service Managers need to make major decisions. It is suggested that the stakeholders to be consulted be limited to:
- > Technical Input Suppliers who has a lot of skin in the game
- > Business Managers who has clients breathing down their necks
- > The best technical experts needed to solve the problem.
Consulting Stakeholders and then making a decision will be time consuming, but the consultation process need to be an integral part of the decision making process. The KEPNERandFOURIE SolutionWise method is an ideal tool vehicle to achieve this aim. Once identified, just involve them in the process of formulating solution requirements, providing information and evaluating same. In this manner, stakeholders or their designated representatives, are not only consulted, they helped create the solution, and can not walk away from it!
To find out more about KEPNERandFOURIE SolutionWise and other processes, download the ITRCA brochure.
