The Pentagon wasted millions of dollars by licensing a unique camouflage design that looks like dense woodlands. Most of Afghanistan’s land, though, is desert, and the Defense Department owns dozens of comparable patterns it could have utilized for free. Due to the aesthetic preferences of a single Afghan officer, the United States spent up to $28 million more than necessary on camouflage uniforms for the Afghan National Army (Brook, 2019). Thus, this project is an example of improper management of stakeholders. This is manifested in the fact that wrong decisions were made by the Pentagon, which did not assess the needs of most of the stakeholders, namely the army itself (Brook, 2019). Timely application of the stakeholder assessment methodology would eliminate such problems in the project implementation as user dissatisfaction with the project product, lack of feedback, and the occurrence of risk events resulting from unsatisfactory communication with stakeholders.
Managing relationships with stakeholders in complex projects is of particular importance since they are usually at the center of the intersection of the interests of many groups. Therefore, to solve such a problem, it is proposed to supplement the traditional criteria for evaluating and ranking stakeholders’ “power” and “interest” with an additional analysis of the potential of the stakeholder. By “potential,” we suggest understanding the possibility of an interested party increasing its significance for the project in the future. The assessment of the degree of influence of this indicator on the project result can take a positive and negative value. In case of negative potential, the importance of the interested party for the project may decrease in the future. The introduction of the “potential” factor makes it possible to revise the goal of project stakeholder management, which will unlock the potential of stakeholders to ensure the project’s benefits and achieve its results.
Reference
Brook, T. V. (2019). Afghan army picked the camo pattern most likely to get its troops shot and we paid for it. USA Today. Web.