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Scenario planning is a tool that is used a lot in strategy formulation, but can be very useful as part of a project’s risk management process. By producing a series of future possibilities as a result of a structured and logical process, you can identify risks and test strategies for eliminating or mitigating them.

Some of the advantages of scenario planning include reducing the risk of groupthink or concentration on a single most likely outcome. It also helps with contingency planning, because it forces “what if?” considerations of a situation. There’s also value to be gained from the process itself, because there’s a focus on learning and understanding rather than problem solving.
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It’s not enough to simply know who your stakeholders are. Different players in the project landscape have very different interests in the outcome, and these can change over time. If not all stakeholders are equal, that implies that you need to tailor your approach to them. The question then becomes “how” should an approach be tailored, and “who” should get which approach?

While it might be desirable to deal with every single stakeholder with a personalised approach, in reality that’s unlikely to be possible. So here’s a technique for classifying stakeholders according to their power and influence, and their interest in the outcome.

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Over at Patrick Mayfield’s ever-useful Lessons Of A Learning Leader, he’s got some thoughts on winning over difficult stakeholders. His argument, and it’s one I agree with, is that one of the main competences of managing stakeholders is effective influencing and negotiation skills.

One of his steps is “Seek win-win or ‘no deal’” – finding out the stakeholder’s “what’s in it for me” position. That’s something that often gets overlooked – although it’s relatively easy to focus on their business objectives, there’s often another underlying dimension of personal goals which influences their approach to the negotiation.

This is particularly the case in change situations where the outcome is going to result in an alteration of their working practices – whether it’s a positive or negative change. There seems to an instinctive human reaction to seek out stability and routine, and one of the challenges of the project manager is to overcome that inertia. So an attempt to understand the personal motivations of a difficult stakeholder can sometimes provide the key to finding a way around their objections.

Patrick’s other point about negotiation is about being clear what your fallback position is – the BATNA, or Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement. While this is a vital thing to consider, I tend to think that this is a rather black-and-white approach. While it may be that there is a clear-cut win/lose situation, more often it’s painted in shades of grey. In this situation a useful mnemonic is BMW – or the Best, Medium, or Worst outcome you can hope for from a situation.

If negotiation is the process of exploring the optimum solution for all parties, then thinking in terms of a Medium – or compromise – solution is often helpful. It recognises the fact that both parties can get a positive result without necessarily having it all their way. And knowing what is your worst-case acceptable scenario (or BATNA) can help to crystalise whether this is an issue which is a vital showstopper that brooks no compromise, or perhaps a relatively unimportant negotiating point which can be sacrificed for gains elsewhere.

As I’m spending 5 hours on a train to and from London today, I figured I’d use the time productively and get some work done – not least catching up on a backlog of emails. I’d thought this was going to be made easier by using the on-board wifi service on the GNER trains between York and London – something that GNER are very proud of, and made much of during their franchise renewal exercise which recently concluded.

It’s presumably all part of their efforts to capture more high-margin business travelers who are willing to pay over the odds for flexible ticketing, station parking and other gizmos, as well as being able to use the traveling time productively. The idea presumably being that if you can get online with the onboard wifi, you can be cranking out those emails.

I can report that in practice, the service is a complete waste of time and money. To start with, the connection speed makes a 9.6kb dialup connection over GSM look like 100Mbs Ethernet. There’s supposedly a satellite connection on the roof of the train, backed up with multiple parallel GSM links – I suspect that reality is more like two tin cans and a very long piece of wet string. Pinging a range of servers such as Google was regularly resulting in 80% packet loss and 9,000 millisecond ping times.

Then halfway through the hour online that I bought, the wifi signal collapsed briefly. When it came back the DHCP server was unreachable, so my Powerbook spent the rest of the journey resolutely stuck with a 169.0.0.0 address.

So, GNER, you owe me the £4.95 I paid for an hour’s (alleged) internet access. If you’re planning to work on any of their Mallard services, I’d recommend you either download everything you need well before getting on the train, or alternatively take a thick paperback book instead. I eventually posted this with the aid of a (much, much faster) GRPS connection from a mobile, while stationary in a Starbucks.

There’s ways and means of breaking bad news. The Torino scale is used to describe the potential impact of an asteroid colliding with the Earth, and it’s had a makeover:

Under the old system, a level 10 warning used to be described as “causing global climatic disaster.” The new description reads “a certain collision capable of causing global climatic catastrophe that may threaten the future of civilization as we know it.”

Hitachi have either a) an excessively large marketing budget or b) a marketing department with an imagination. Delete as applicable…

This could be the functionality that sends Skype mainstream. They’ve just announced Skype Voicemail – which provides fully-featured offline voicemail capabilities; and SkypeIn – a fixed line number interface to your standard Skype account.

Both features are the kind of standard functionality that you’d take as read with a mobile or a fixed-line service, so that fact that they’re now available with in VOIP form is a further step towards equivalence. Add SkypeOut, and the service is beginning to look like a genuine business-class replacement for a fixed-line service.

The only downside I’ve found so far is the need for a dedicated headset – although the sound quality through the built-in microphone on a Powerbook is reasonably OK, it’s a bit wearing on the other party if you’re constantly dropping in and out.

Patrick Mayfield has rumours of a new edition of the Prince 2 manual due out at the end of May – the current edition dates back to 1998, so it’s about due. He also points out the burgeoning popularity of the methodology – certainly a quick and highly unscientific scan of the job boards suggests that a majority of advertised PM roles are specifying Prince as a prerequisite, along with an increasing mention of ITIL in connection with support and operational management roles.

Spotted in the current edition of Computing:

The world’s loveliest digital TV set-top box business seeks yet more beautiful people avec les noggins superieur (due to European expansion).

Desktop Support – human shield

We’re looking for a super-smiley wide-awake support guru to act as a part-time bodyguard to our IT manager. We love Linux. It goes like stink, but the desktop drones keep buggering it up. So you’ll need the interpersonal skills of Kofi Annan and a brain the size of a family saloon. You’ll also love getting down and dirty with Macs and know something about Firefox, Contakt, OpenOffice, Jabber and Exodus.

You give us:
- your earthly soul

We give you:
- £25 – 35K, a pension, subsidised gym membership and 65 cups of coffee a day.

Digital TV software engineers

Your current employer doesn’t pay you anywhere near enough. Nor will we. But we do promise you a better time scratching a living wage with us than with the tank-top-wearing ex-hippie you slave for now.
You’ll get to play with the latest and greatest in digital TV products in all their colourful myriad forms – DVB in a box, PVR in a box and IPTV in a box. And if you don’t have fun doing it, we’ll eat your hat.

You give us:
- A good degree or equivalent experience (such as a Saturday job in a chip shop).
- C, real-time embedded OSs and/or Linux and at least two of: DTT stacks, driver development, MPEG, internet protocols, streaming protocols, C++, assembler and punch card handling.
- Experience in GUI development, C+++, interactive services and the obscene retouching of pictures of the CEO would all be a bonus.

And we’ll give you:
- £35-£55k and a company pension.
- Subsidised gym membership.
- Facilities to laminate flowers and paint body parts, or, indeed, vice versa.

Production – are you beastly?

We need a scar-faced sinewy son of Frankenstein to do the hatchet jobs on our suppliers. You’ll be a straight-talking, no-prisoner-taking, bulgey-eyed, menacing barbarian. (Or you’ll need 3 years in production, a relevant HND or higher and a talent for turning slim margins into fat profits.)
In return for your undivided evil, there’s £25-35k, pension, and lots and lots of Natracalm, if you promise not to hurt us.

Spotted on del.icio.us: The Secret Life of Paper, by Malcolm Gladwell.

Computer technology was supposed to replace paper. But that hasn’t happened. Every country in the Western world uses more paper today, on a per-capita basis, than it did ten years ago.

A fascinating article, and one that goes a long way to explaining the state of my desk…