Managing stakeholders: The Power of Collaboration

We had to create a service that would help low-income citizens to save and improve their saving behaviour.

The general view was that the project wasn’t going to be ready on time for the Government review.

Results

• Example of good work and achievements by the digital team in HMRC
• 100% delivery on time.
• Passed the GDS assessment

My role

I joined the team to make it work and ready for the Government Digital Service (GDS) assessment as the general view was that the project was going to fail.

Challenges

Too many cooks spoil the broth.

The project involved different teams, different interests and requirements pulling in different directions.

One size doesn’t fit all

The design patterns available were not designed for transactional services of this kind.

Design the right communication strategy

“When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”

Identify the players

Over the years I have learnt that the first days in a new role I get the most done by listening.

Is a common mistake when you first arrive at a new place needing to stand out, make your mark. My recommendation would always be: “Don’t do it.”.

When you are new in a place, you only have a superficial idea of the project and no idea at all about the stakeholders and power relations.

The first thing to do is trying to join as many meetings as possible, not to say anything, to identify the roles in the room. The same way you would do it in a focus group.

I even took notes and created some sketches in a notebook to visualise the relations around the table.

Divide and conquer

The more complex a team or teams become the most important is this part.

If you want to convince a big team to do something, even having the research to back it up, the worst thing you can do is to share it with everyone at the same time.

Define when and who gets the information first, the stakeholder that has more to lose if the project doesn’t perform in the long run.

Show them the research and explain the consequences of not doing it.

Usually, this stakeholder is the one that in extreme cases can change the deadlines or the requirements.

Identifying and convincing this person will make it much easier to convince the rest of the stakeholders.

Choose the right battlefield

Phone calls or emails with attachments are ok for small decisions but for big ones face to face, or video calls are better because:

• You can identify non-verbal cues.
• You decide the pace of the presentation, in person or screen-sharing.

Seeing the users fail always has more impact than telling how the users failed. Use short videos of the research demonstrating how critical is a design problem.

Use the principle of reciprocity (Source: “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion”, Robert B. Cialdini) in your favour:

1. Make at least two proposals: the ideal solution and a B plan less demanding for the team and the project but good enough for the user.
2. If the first one is not accepted the chances of getting the second option done are much higher.

Empathy

Having three teams working in a project like this can be an issue. There can be frictions and issues as each team has different objectives.

This different interests can produce frustrating situations and confrontations each team pulling in their direction.

That’s what was happening with the project when I arrived each team had their UX designer and researcher pulling in opposite directions.

At the end of the day, we need to understand that everyone wants to deliver the best service and have a set of constraints. Once you know what the needs and limitations of the others are, you can reassure them that you are there to help and turn a confrontational relation in a collaborative one.

Don’t try to reinvent the wheel

The chances are that other people have been in the same place as you and have done their research and design.

Due to the tight deadline, there was no time to design and test different solutions so:

• We researched the most common tasks of our target user
• Heuristic analysis to identify the best solutions in the banking industry providing us with a good start point to test.
• Created a prototype merging all this data and known patterns
• Usability testing with five users every fortnight and incremental iterations.

Using this process, we were able to design a functional solution and optimise it in each iteration while the developers built it.

Conclusion

As a result of all these efforts, we were able to deliver a fully functional prototype for the Government Digital Service assessment.

We were able to document the research findings and how they affected the design in each iteration and passed the assessment (Read GDS report here).

Currently Help to Save is a live service and one of the most successful projects in the HMRC Digital portfolio. It’s commonly used as an example of collaboration and great results around Government.