When managing your stakeholders, it is important to know the dominate behavioral characteristics of your stakeholders. Whereas each stakeholder will not be 100% a junker or 100% procedural, knowing their dominate behavioral characteristics can be very help in several situations. It should also note that one is not necessary better than the other, they are simply different. So what is a junker? A junker is somebody that is comfortable doing a variety of different things at the same time. Whereas a procedural person does best completely one activity before proceeding to something new. Some occupations lend themselves to one type more than others. For example, if you ever need brain surgery, you want a Doctor that is very procedural, otherwise your survival chances are not good. However, if you’re a journalist, you have to be able to change course, literally, at a moments notice, to get the story.
Knowing a person’s dominate behavioral characteristics can play a major role in who you ask and what you ask people to do. For example, a procedural person will go nuts in a help desk role. Whereas a junker in a requirement gathering role may get very distracted and take much longer than is necessary.
Another way to look at it is that procedural people almost have to do things in order, A then B then C, etc. Whereas junkers are very comfortable doing a little A, then skip to K, and then back to C and so on. If you really want trouble on your hands, put one procedural person and one junker on a procedural task. If they don’t kill each other, they will probably never want to work with each other again.