Disney Case Stakeholder Communications

Disney's American project ultimately never manifested due to a slew of different reasons. However, one of the most fundamental breakdowns in the process was definitely stakeholder communications. The project had a lot of support from many people in the community. The project would have resulted in the creation of many local jobs and been an enormous driver of economic activity for the local community. Furthermore, it was Disney's vision that the theme park would be even more extraordinary source of pride for the American population in general. Not everyone shared this vision however. James McPherson, Princeton professor, believed that the site was too significant historically to be trivialized and commercialized by Disney.

The project's failure was due to the miscommunication with key stakeholders in the planning phase. It is likely that if Disney communicated better with these stakeholders early on in the project, then the project could have progressed as opposed to dying out. An effective stakeholder communication plan would have likely exposed many risks that the project faced early on. If these critical risks were identified in the planning phase, then they likely could have been mitigated. Some of the critical risks that the case alludes to include:

The name of the project...

It is common for projects fail because of poor communication either amongst the project team or with communication with stakeholders. In Disney's case, the communication plan should have identified all of the key stakeholders early on and brought them on as a consultant during the planning phase. The feedback generated from these stakeholders could have helped to identify the risks the project faced more effectively. Since projects, by their very definition, deal with a unique circumstance then they are plagued by risk inherently (Benta, 2011).
There are many best practices for risk identification and probabilistic analysis, however there have only been recent developments in regards to adding an estimated cost for the contingency plan (Hollmann, 2009). If Disney had a better understanding about the risks that the project faced, then they could have create risk mitigation and contingency plans that actually included a cost benefit analysis. For example, if Disney would identified the key risk factors then they could have considered multiple locations and had different options readily available. This would…