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Pareto: Stakeholders in the Spotlight
In the last issue of 5MI, we gave an overview of the Pareto Principle – which suggests that in most situations, about 80% of useful results are generated by 20% of the total effort. Over the next few editions, we’ll take a closer look at how this broad principle can be applied to different aspects of insight. We’ll start by exploring how it affects stakeholders…
A stake in the business
How do you allocate your time (and the work you need to do for them) to your various stakeholders? A quick Pareto analysis can give you a little insight into this:
- Relative worth - Firstly, think about your stakeholders in terms of their value and their impact on business. This may vary considerably. If you were to line up your stakeholders in order of their importance to your business, you would probably find that around 20% of them are responsible for 80% of the value to the business.
- Strategic importance - No doubt some of your stakeholders have a major strategic input to your organisation. Consider how your insight is helping them with this. If you get it right, a healthy relationship with these key stakeholders will enhance the impact profile of insight. Just think: are you acting proactively and keeping them up to date with everything they need?
- Resource allocation - Then consider how you allocate your time and effort to your stakeholders. Do the most important people get the lion’s share? Or are there people who have a relatively small impact on business but who take up a lot of your energy or resources? If so, it’s time to review and re-align your resources.
Sharpen your focus!
Once you have identified the most valuable people, you need to focus on how you can help them to deliver real value:
- How well do you understand their business issues and needs?
- Are you delivering what they need and making it easy for them to use it?
- Have they become advocates for insight?
Similarly, if you have pinpointed those people who are using up significant resources but aren’t adding a great deal of value, how can you help them to plan and prioritise their needs? Can you make insight sources available to them on a more ad hoc, DIY basis?
By adopting this more analytical approach to your stakeholders, you will be able to start allocating your time and resources so that they are more closely aligned with your business needs and the value that each stakeholder provides.
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