End Users Are Stakeholders Too
End users rarely appear high on a stakeholder map. They control no budget, sit on no board, and cannot stop a project. They also determine, completely, whether the thing the project builds is used as intended, worked around, or quietly abandoned once the attention moves on. That combination, no formal authority and total practical authority, is what makes them the group most often misjudged.
Section 2.5.4 of The Standard for Project Management covers end users and other key stakeholders, and the practical question for a project manager is not whether they are represented. It is whether anybody has watched them work.
No formal power, complete practical power
They cannot approve or stop anything. Which is why they are easy to leave out of a governance structure and why their absence never registers as a risk: nothing in the project's machinery notices.
They decide the outcome afterwards. Adoption, workaround, or abandonment, and that decision is made by people acting sensibly under their own pressures. A system that is slower than the old way for the person using it will lose, whatever the business case said, and no amount of senior endorsement changes that arithmetic.
Why proxies are not enough
The representative has usually moved on from the work. A team leader or a subject expert who did the job three, five or eight years ago answers honestly and describes a job that has since changed. Everybody proceeds in good faith on a description that is out of date in exactly the details that matter.
Proxies answer for the average case. Asked how something works, a representative describes the normal path, because that is what is memorable and describable. Most of the pain in operational work lives in the exceptions, which are numerous, individually rare and invisible from a distance.
Proxies have their own interests. A department head sponsoring a change has an interest in it succeeding, and will report enthusiasm. That is not dishonesty; it is the normal behaviour of somebody who has backed something, and it means their account of user sentiment should be treated as one input among several.
Six years since the last claim
An insurer was redesigning the desktop used by its claims handlers. A user representative was appointed: an experienced team leader, respected, genuinely helpful, who had last handled a claim personally about six years earlier.
The design work proceeded through her, and she was conscientious. The screens followed the process as she described it, which was the process as it had been documented, and as she had worked it when she was on the phones.
On the floor, the job had changed. Handlers now worked two systems side by side because a third-party policy record had been added in the intervening years, and the physical evidence was visible down every row: monitors propped up on stacks of paper reams to raise them, keyboards pushed forward, each stack a slightly different height according to who sat there.
The new desktop assumed one screen's worth of work at a time. When it arrived, handling time rose by about eleven per cent and stayed there, because people were doing the same two-system dance with a layout that had been designed as though the second system did not exist.
The remedy was two afternoons. The project's analyst sat beside four handlers, watched, and asked nothing for the first hour. The propped monitors, the taped crib notes and the two-system switching were apparent within twenty minutes. The redesign that followed took six weeks and brought handling time below where it had started.
The representative had done nothing wrong. She had been asked to describe a job she no longer did, and she had described it accurately as it had been.
Engaging them cheaply
Watch before asking. An hour sitting beside somebody doing the work produces observations no interview will, because people describe what they believe they do and demonstrate what they actually do. It costs an afternoon and it is the highest-value hour available in most discovery.
Use small numbers, early, with something concrete. Four or five users, looking at a mock-up or a prototype, in week six rather than week thirty. The objections that come back are cheap then and expensive later, and the same objections will arrive either way.
For a PMP® candidate, it helps to recognise that end users hold practical authority over adoption, so a scenario about a delivered system being worked around is asking who was actually consulted. A response that briefs the user representative again returns to the source that was already imperfect. Situations where everybody with formal authority approved and the users were never watched get real attention in a structured PMP exam preparation course.
Arrange one afternoon on a live project. Sit beside two people who will use what you are building, watch them do the current version of the job, and write down what surprises you. If nothing surprises you, you know the work well. If something does, that is the design conversation you were going to have anyway, arriving early enough to act on.
Interested in going further?
The group with the least standing in a project's governance usually decides what happens to its output. Omega's PMP® Exam Preparation works through stakeholder engagement where the power is informal and decisive.
End users and other key stakeholders are described in The Standard, published with the PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition.
Ad · Amazon affiliate link.
References
A136: Why Hostile Stakeholders Still Need Engagement
A007: The Standard for Project Management vs the PMBOK Guide
A132: The PMBOK 8 Stakeholders Performance Domain: What It Really Covers
A137: When Stakeholders Disagree: What Should the PM Do First?
A133: Stakeholder Management vs Stakeholder Engagement
PMP and PMBOK are registered marks of the Project Management Institute, Inc.
