8. Failure to Manage Stakeholder Communications
     Stakeholders are those individuals or groups who, at some time during the Maintenance change cycle, will affect and be affected by what is happening. Obvious stakeholders are those directly involved in the changes, but you may need to consider others outside this group. Stakeholders include Production Managers, Production Supervisors, Production Workers, Maintenance Supervisors, Maintenance Tradesmen, Engineers, Suppliers, members of the change team etc. You need to think about how, in your own way, you can bring them on board to support change. Experience shows that this is a major hurdle standing between your change project as an idea on paper, and your change project as implemented reality. All of the good ideas in the world go nowhere if the people affected by them and affecting them do not give them their support. 
     Motivating stakeholders to make their agenda yours is no easy task. One reason for its difficulty is that so many stakeholders are involved in complex change. Adding to the complexity, each of these stakeholder individuals and groups perceives themselves as having different stakes. Further, their views of the project, and what it all means is likely to evolve during the course of the project - implying that you will need to revisit stakeholders from time to time, listen to their hopes and fears and to re-instill the positive change message. Finally, your biggest obstacle to successful change could be your organization's past experience with change. That experience is likely to be mixed at best. 
     The more specifically you know your stakeholder groups and individuals, the better you will foresee how to influence them. To develop an effective communication plan, you will need to consider each one so that you have a credible map of their perceived interests and levels of influence. For each group you will need to tackle two issues:
  • How will this change affect them? Stakeholders will be assessing the change project in terms of their own personal wins and losses. Conjecture on your part as to how they are thinking about the proposed change can be dangerous - better to ask them directly. 
  • What do they think of the people in charge? Relationships play an enormous role in the success or failure of change projects. A change team staffed by highly credentialed and respected individuals can have a significant influence over the others in the organization. If your change team is not staffed by these types of people, then you are in trouble.
     Newton's Third Law was never so true: An object at rest tends to stay at rest until acted upon by external forces. In change projects, inertia is to be avoided. It is too easy for stakeholders to remain right where they are; especially if they are anxious about the change project. Stakeholders need continuous invitations to become involved, constant reassurance that they will get their wins.
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