Boosting Project Success Through Stakeholder Engagement

The assignment content revolves around a real-life experience of managing a new product launch project. The team responsible for the project consisted of brand marketing, UAE marketing, procurement, and ATL creative agency. Initially, a fixed retainer fee was paid to the ATL creative agency, but later, it was changed to a performance-based fee structure. Despite this change, the agency did not adapt well to the new system and eventually had to be paid more than the initial retainer fee. The project also faced issues with stakeholder management, communication, and progress tracking. To resolve these issues, the assignment suggests adapting the Start model to each project context, mapping stakeholders' interests, and preparing better project plans.

Contents
Introduction.......................................................................................................................................1
My Role, Role of Project................................................................................................................1
Course Concept................................................................................................................................ 2
Insights and Ideas........................................................................................................................... 5
Key Learning and Actions............................................................................................................7
Critical Reflection on the assignment process...................................................................8

Strategic Management of Projects – A3 Reflection Paper
Introduction
In this paper I will briefly discuss about my reflection on project management
experience in procurement position past few years, and the knowledge that I have learnt
from SMOP module, and how these knowledge have changes and improve my daily
work.
Briefly, I will begin with discussion about my role in the company, role of the project I
worked, and main problem that I have faced during project management process in
delivering those projects. Then I will discuss about designing and leading project
organization concept. Thereafter, I will discuss how I have applied selected concept, and
how does it worked out in my daily work. Then, I will discuss my key learnings and
action plan in the future. Everything will be summarized at the end of the paper.
My Role, Role of Project
I have been indirect material and services procurement function in Dubai since 2011.
The company is industrial leader in GCC markets with more than 35% market share.
Although industrial volume has been declining since a decade ago, the company’s
performance steadily grew in its market share, volume, and revenue. The industry
operates in similar model of FMCG companies where new product launches, innovation
and speed to market are extremely important factors to compete in the market. The
company covers Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, and Kuwait.
Most of my time are allocated to deliver marketing materials and services for new
product launch project from procurement side. This type of projects are made to
support new product communication to increase consumer awareness which includes
Page | 1

Strategic Management of Projects – A3 Reflection Paper
various activities of advertising, marketing, consumer engagement, and trade
promotions.
My role in the project is to ensure compliance of company principle and policies during
sourcing to pay process, conduct competitive bidding, get best price from suppliers, and
generate annual cost saving for company’s operating cost.
However, I have faced many challenges during the process of delivering the project, as
most of time we are lack of project governance, no clear definition of project
responsibilities among team members, too many stakeholders with different opinions
and no one really take the responsibilities to make the tough decisions, lack of clear
scope of work, duplicate effort between ATL creative agency 1and procurement, conflict
of interest of ATL creative agency as their best interest is to spend more hours in our
project to generate more revenue, inconsistent government regulation in different
markets, there is also no incentive for ATL creative agency and procurement to work as
one team.
Ultimately, the biggest problem would be lack of project governance, and dedicated no
project sponsor or project manager was assigned to spend maximum effort to design
and lead the project team.
Course Concept
In order to resolve various I have faced during project management process, the best
concept would be designing and leading the project organization that introduced in
SMOP module study guide.
1 ATL creative agency: the agency who propose creative concept of the product, overall
campaign, design theme, consumer selling message for the whole new product deployment
project
Page | 2

Strategic Management of Projects – A3 Reflection Paper
By using the concept of designing and leading project organization, management team
as the project client will have clear picture of how project team is managed, and how are
they planning to achieve given mission.
According to Galbraith’s Star model (Galbraith 1995) design a project organization
include following key elements scope, structure, process, incentive and competencies.
Why I prefer this concept over others are because the five key elements are closely
interconnected, also equally placed to meet project mission. It allows project managers
to make choices based on different context to design the most suitable project
organization. In today’s rapidly changing business environment, the agility to cope with
changes are extremely important to prevail from fierce competition.
Under structure framework, the client, project team and suppliers defined as promoter,
financier, decision maker and recruiters, which is nice example of classifying our
internal stakeholders. In my case, the senior management team can be positioned as
client who fund the project as financier and promoter, marketing manager can be
positioned as decision maker to push the project through life cycle, and recruiter can be
procurement who identify the most capable suppliers to actualize the project for the
company.
Within the project team, apart from project manager who coordinate all teams
and lead on executions, the existence of project sponsor also can be important to
the success of project, as sometime the ultimate decision maker with appropriate
seniority and power to make tough decision would facilitate project organization
Page | 3

Strategic Management of Projects – A3 Reflection Paper
to go back to right track of project instead of wasting a lot of valuable time on
debating.
The RACI model also was valuable to project management for my projects,
because most of the time there are a lot of duplicate efforts between brand
marketing team and ATL creative agency about who decides on creative, brand
marketing team and local marketing team about who decides on budget, ATL
creative agency and procurement about who decides the suppliers selections. By
adopting clear set of roles and responsibility of who is responsible, accountable,
consult and inform, it would allow me to set clear boundaries within project
team who is doing what and responsible for the result accordingly. It motivate
the culture of taking ownership of your job, and easier to find out bottle neck
when things go wrong.
In terms of process, working in large organization it is inevitable to face
bureaucracy when comes to challenge the process or change the process. What is
important is always to follow the process of approval, budget allocation,
document exception. In theory, process are only enabler that will deliver value
for customer and clients, it should make things smoother. However in our
company process sometime perceived as blocker of delivering the project.
Internal approval process for each gateway not always help to speed up the
process, but rather struggle with endless debate and inefficient discussion that
reach no conclusions.
Page | 4

Strategic Management of Projects – A3 Reflection Paper
Insights and Ideas
In order to solve identified issues like lack of project governance, no clear definition of
project responsibilities among team members, too many stakeholders with different
opinions and no one really take the responsibilities to make the tough decisions.
I have tried to adopt the Galbraith’s Star model into the latest project we did for one of
the project launch in UAE.
Firstly, we introduced role of project sponsor, together with brand marketing team we
nominated the marketing director for this position to guide overall direction for our
project. Marketing director set overall purpose of the project, and explained why are we
launching the new product, mostly due to ongoing competition and competitors recently
launched few innovative products encroach our market share. As response move, by
launching our new product in UAE is pivotal step to sustain our market share.
Scope of the project were defined into few categories, market deployment plan, target
consumer contacts, rate of POS coverage, printed marketing materials, consumer
giveaways, digital marketing tool i.e. mobile app, website, database, TV advertising and
online advertising coverage. The ultimate objective is to achieve 0.4% market share in
first six month after launching the new products. Therefore we have formed aggressive
communication channel coverage, including google ads, Youtube ads, billboard
placement, large super market promotions, cover 100% contracted key account and
general trade retailers’ shelves.
Structure responsibility were also defined together with brand marketing team
(responsible for creative directions), UAE marketing team (responsible for deployment
Page | 5

Strategic Management of Projects – A3 Reflection Paper
and budget), procurement team (responsible for supplier selection for marketing
materials and services) and ATL creative agency (responsible for creative concept and
color proof). Brand marketing team appoint one of the brand manager as project
manager to lead the project.
Incentive, we proposed to change ATL creative agency fee from fixed retainer into
project performance based fee. Previously ATL creative agency was paid approximately
USD 200,000 to USD 300,000 for similar scale of project for all kinds of creative
concepts. After our proposal, it became the first project ATL creative agency fee will be
paid in range in three tier, 80%, 100% and 120% of USD 250,000 depends on final
performance of the new product launch.
Competence, we suggested HR department to conduct bi-annual project
management workshops focus on developing team leadership skills, project
management skills and other soft skills that are useful in delivering projects.
But, it was just a nice plan.
Our project sponsor was always busy with other tasks in his agenda, the amount
of attention we have got in given project was very minimum. We anticipate much
bigger support from him to make tough decision, for instance the project team
debated few times whether to invest $150,000 to Youtube for banner to increase
consumer awareness. Both brand team and ATL creative would love to do so,
however procurement and UAE marketing team against it, as the cost per
acquisition was much higher than profit we make by selling one product, and
Youtube is monopoly in this segment, we have very minimum negotiation power
Page | 6

Strategic Management of Projects – A3 Reflection Paper
to get better price, hence the return on investment would be low. Eventually this
idea was halted until further notice, not cancelled, not proceeded.
Ironically, after changing incentive scheme with ATL creative agency, it didn’t
work well as maintaining their performance with different rewarding scheme
was difficult. ATL creative agency stop working extra hours to change creative
designs when it’s needed. We lost flexibility to control ATL creative agency, as
they would argue that we have utilized all assigned hours for the project, and the
only way to continue is to amend the contract to reflect new cost. In the end, we
had to pay 15% more than previous retainer fees structure.
Additionally, we also made nice project charter plan with Gantt chart and
network diagrams to showcase all related task. However we later failed to keep
track of progress, also due to other work commitment we could not
communicate on periodically basis to share latest updates. Later we had to
schedule weekly meeting in order to keep everyone up to date.
In order to resolve all of these issues, I would recommend to continue to polish
the Start model but to better adapt context of each project, map stakeholder’s
interest before starting any projects, not only focus on internal stakeholders, also
external stakeholders include ATL creative agency and suppliers. Prepare better
project plan integrate with responsibility and resources allocation. Engage with
senior management team to seek for their advice to come up with better
incentive programme for such new product launch projects and develop more
comprehensive training plan to build competence for project team members.
Page | 7

Strategic Management of Projects – A3 Reflection Paper
Key Learning and Actions
The key learnings that I have gained are as following, in order to manage and
deliver successful projects, imitate completely from theory will not bring
significant improve the quality of project management as it seems. I must
consider context of each project to design project organization, therefore
understanding stakeholder’s interest and their workload will help to form better
project team.
Additionally, I have learnt deeply that the key factor of success for delivering a
project is people, when people are happy about working on particular project.
Project members should have positive attitude to work towards to project
mission, knowing how to involve others as a team, and their future development
after completing the project. Then we can talk about what kind of methodology,
theory and concepts are more suitable to the situations.
In the end, what shapes the world is us, the people, not system.
Page | 8

Strategic Management of Projects – A3 Reflection Paper
Critical Reflection on the assignment process
By doing personal reflection on my own experience of project management, it
has changed my passive attitude of passively receving task from marketing
teams. I started proactively looking into new opportunities to seek for better
ways to complete the same task, even start asking a better question like why do I
need to do this? Is there a way to automate this task? Can I find a better to
consolidate similar task for a better cost and more efficient ways? What are the
things that I can change personally? Who should I speak to in order to push
things forward?
With all these questions in mind, I have started discovering new technology,
software, talk to different people from other industry how they managed similar
situations, what are potential solution and best practice I can possible adapt in
my company.
Also, I used to worry by myself whenever facing a trouble or obstacle, after
reflection process I have come to a conclusion that I must start trust others, to
empower them, to make them strong. So that collectively we can be better and
stronger project team.
Page | 9

Strategic Management of Projects – A3 Reflection Paper
Reference
Strategic Management of Project Study Guide (2016)
Page | 10