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This presentation begins by asking the question, “When a project team fails to appreciate a crucial aspect of stakeholder culture, what are the chances of negotiating and achieving the project’s requirements?” Projects are about change in an organised manner. They are part of the narrative concerns of the corresponding organisations which is indicated in the question, “Are the explicit business objectives of projects, at some deeper level, hiding the more significant meanings of projects for the stakeholders?” Each cultural group sees different connections between requirements. The way solutions are designed and how they affect the various stakeholder groups is a major cultural issue. As part of our discussion, we ask whether project management sees itself as culturally independent and universal in its application or whether it has its own narrative that needs to be understood alongside the other narratives.

A benign way to understand the scope of the problem of cultural misperception is to explore and develop narratives of two types: (a) of origin and creation, which show the meanings of identity and history; (b) of quest and journey, which show the meanings of possible project trajectories. Our goal is to establish the trust that is necessary for human interaction and productive work.

The heartbeat economy is a shift in thinking from that of mass production. Its principle is to deliver goods and services that do not raise your customer’s heart rate or blood pressure. This presentation uses the notion of heartfelt requirements to guide our work with stories. If you have, in McWhinney’s terms (1992), a storytelling culture then you will find out what it is possible to achieve and indeed maximise what it is possible to achieve given the set of stakeholder concerns.

Stream: Change

Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

Steve Armstrong has been at the Open University since 1993. He was part of project that looked into the management of change in distributed systems that was funded by the Department of Trade and Industry where he met Aidan Ward. On the teaching side, his primary interest is project management and requirements engineering. He has also been involved with other courses dealing with the development of software systems.
Having spent a number of years as a working as a consultant software engineer and project manager, he has been fascinated by the successes and failures of project working. He has continued to research into aspects of organisational change and the people who are involved in it.

Aidan's skills are in improving people's ability to collaborate to achieve difficult or risky outcomes. He works on the basis that communication always depends on trust and building that trust is an active process. In multi-agency environments with each agency having different accountabilities, this is a considerable challenge to much current practice.
Aidan founded Antelope in 1991 and is managing director and principal consultant. He developed the Scimitar Risk Management System with Susannah Finzi and recently co-authored the book Trust and Mistrust, published by John Wiley, with John Smith.
He has managed projects and business risks in many sectors, including retail supply chains, telecoms, insurance, foodservice and local authorities. He has applied his risk management knowledge in many domains such as ICT security, multi-agency smartcards, supply chain development, major programmes, health and safety and project evaluation.