Using Social Network Analysis: Are You The Center Of Your Stakeholder Network?

When I got my first class on computer networks, I was hooked. I loved the idea of small packets of information hopping from one computer to another. Amazed about how the information always seemed to arrive at the right spot, even if there were a gazillion computers connected, like on the Internet. Although I never worked in that particular field of information technology, I still remember an important lesson from the routing-algorithms that could be used. To find out which way another computer was located within the network, you can use one single computer as the main guide; that host has all the data needed to locate the computer you want to send your information package to.

This sound very effective at first, and it even is, if not too many PCs and mainframes are connected to the network. However, when you are thinking about the Internet, forget it. The information is just too much, and always outdated if you try to have a single map of the net. You have also a single point of failure in this scenario. If this one computer crashes, not one package will arrive at its destination. In search for alternatives, my mind was fixed on needing a map of the network. As it turned out, you can also have algorithms without the need for a image of the entire network; if you get a data package, you just give it to a computer you are connected with, and that accepts it the fastest. I never forget the new: the hot-potato-algorithm. After a while, the package will end if with its destination.

Social Networks

People in small and large groups can be viewed as networks. In this particular, social networks. Every person is indicated as a dot, and any relationship between dots are drawn as a line between the dots. The person is the computer, and the relationship is the network cable. As networks are a particular type of graphs, the official terms are edges for the dots and vertices for the lines. The field of social networking analysis can provide us with some insights, structures and definitions when looking at stakeholders in groups. “A social network analysis examines the structure of social relationships in a group to uncover the informal connections between people.” [1] What exactly makes up the connection, the relationship between the people in the graph, is a choice of the analyst. Communication, awareness, trust, decision making and interactions of any kind. The social network analysis might reveal a pattern that could point to, or explain the occurrence of, a problem.

Being The Bottleneck In Your Project

Suppose you work as a Team Lead for a development group. The teams performance is not what you would have expected if you consider the experience of its members. You know just the problem: they are lousy programmers, despite their experience. You just do it yourself and leave those incompetent fools to their own devices. If I would visit your project as a Project Profiler, aware of “a” problem, not aware of your opinion, I could try to plot a network of the communication of bug-reports and requirements. This should not be too difficult as most software projects have requirements and issues logged in a database, with some kind of work-flow who is assigned to the task. Great resource of information. I will see requirements drip in from user groups, to project manager, to team lead, and further. A social network is a nice visual aid, and I will make the arrows of information flow thicker if more information is passed to a particular person.

Guess what? All big fat arrows are pointing towards you in the network. You have a very high centrality. Centrality is the extent to which a person is in the center of a network [1]. It seems that all information about requirements flows through you, and very little information flows from you, especially towards your team members. The reason why you do this, remains to be discovered, but you are caught. You are identified as the problem. Another great day for the Project Profiler.

Sitting Close Together

Not every stakeholder is interacting in a group the same with all other stakeholders. Sometimes people will talk to each other every hour, e.g. when they are in the same room and part of the same team; in other cases people will never see or speak each other at all during the course of the project (the lonely tester and the financial director for example). When viewing stakeholder as a group of interactions, not every pair will be the same; in the corresponding network there will be no line from every dot to all other dots in the network. You will see some form of clustering; smaller groups that have a high degree of interaction. People that will communicate more with each other because of the fact that they are closer located, or in the same team, or need to because of their tasks. Looking at the most simple form, you will see that stakeholders from the same group are more tighter nit together. A group can be defined by having the same or a closely related role within the project (see table).

Among certain members a higher level of interaction will occur. Here the term “density” is used. “It is a proportion that indicates the number of actual ties present in the group relative to the number of possible ties in the group (i.e., if everyone had a relationship with everyone else in the group).” [1] If certain parts of a social network have a higher density, that can indicate the formation of so-called “sub-groups” or “cliques”. People that connect sub-groups together are called “hubs”. If we take a look at projects, you can image that the Project Manager is some kind of super-hub.

[1] Inside Social Network Analysis, Kate Ehrlich and Inga Carboni