PMBOK7 Perspectives: Analyzing Stakeholder Attitude

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In this edition of Project Pointers, we’ll look at stakeholder attitudes, one of the new approaches to analyzing stakeholders in the Project Management Institute’s latest version of the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBoK7.)

In PMBOK7, Knowledge Areas are replaced with Performance Domains, which recommend additional activities in several areas, including stakeholder analysis. Let’s look at challenging stakeholder attitudes and responses that increase your success in stakeholder management.

  • Inattentive/indifferent. Key stakeholders can behave as if they don’t care about the project or its outcomes even if they would be positively or negatively impacted by those outcomes. They might not pay attention due to their workload, business issues, or other distractions. Remember, your project isn’t the only thing on the stakeholder’s plate.
    • To gain the attention of a distracted stakeholder, talk to the stakeholder’s peers and support staff to find ways to engage the stakeholder.
    • Use clear and persuasive graphics or flowcharts to show how the project might impact the them. Share this information with the stakeholder’s department.
    • Demonstrate that the stakeholder needs to decide between the alternatives by a specific date. Clearly communicate that the project team will make the decision if the stakeholders doesn’t respond by that date. This approach doesn’t guarantee a response from the stakeholder, but it typically gets their attention. If the stakeholder disagrees with your choices, you have documentation that they had an opportunity to make the decision and opted not to.
  • Fearful. Stakeholders who fear negative project outcomes are challenging to manage. Their past experiences may have been bad. Fear can manifest through micromanagement, requests for overly-detailed status reports, and drawn out decision-making.

Talk to your stakeholder to understand their concerns. You may have risk mitigation plans in place that address their fears. Communicate your plans, or create new risk items, and obtain the stakeholder’s approval for the mitigation and status sharing strategies should their concerns come to fruition. You might reduce their fear by demonstrating that you understand their concerns and have plans to address them.

  • Demanding and self-centered. All stakeholders are affected by the project by definition. Some stakeholders act as if they are the only project stakeholder. They place demands on the project without regard for the needs of other project stakeholders. If the demanding stakeholder is your sponsor, that is likely their prerogative. If not, emphasize the other project requirements you are managing with this stakeholder. If they continue to show no regard for other stakeholders, get your sponsor involved to negotiate with this demanding stakeholder. (Remember, the project sponsor is responsible for the project and its outcomes, and wants to see the project succeed.) The sponsor can then help you reprioritize the project requirements. At that point, you can cite the sponsor’s directions when you deal with the demanding stakeholder.
  • Wheeler/dealer. Stakeholders might offer funding or resources for a project in a bid to get their desired outcomes added to a project. They might be extraordinarily persistent! This can seem like a variation on the demanding stakeholder in the previous point. You might consider asking them to work with the sponsor to prioritize their outcomes. It might make sense to introduce new requirements or reprioritize requirements in exchange for benefits. For that reason, the best approach is to handle these proposals through your standard project change management practices.
  • Indecisive. Slow decision-making by stakeholders impacts project schedules — and cost when resources assignments must be extended. Being proactive is the best way to address this situation. Major project decisions have to be made after stakeholders consider the pros and cons of alternatives. Include a specific task, assigned to the sponsor or key stakeholders, delineating the decision to be made and the time allocated for them to research and consider their position. In addition, calculate and communicate what it costs for each day that the major project decision is delayed. This can help illuminate highlight the impact stakeholder indecisiveness has on your project. You can also use this information to create a project change request to alter the project schedule and budget due to the decision-making delays.

Have experience with any or all of these stakeholder attitudes? If you have insights and suggestions for dealing with them, add them in the comments section.

For more about stakeholders, check out Natasha Kasimtseva’s Managing Project Stakeholders course.

Coming Up

Bonnie Biafore and John Riopel will talk about how to manage dependencies, meetings, and overall communication in hybrid projects on February 17, 2022, at 1PM MT. Traditional and agile/iterative project management approaches have similarities and differences, so you might wonder how to manage hybrid projects that use both. Although the approaches differ, there are points within a hybrid project where deliverables need to align. For example, a traditional deliverable must be completed before part of the agile effort can start – or vice versa. Even in hybrid projects, the project team is a single team that needs good communication and occasional team-wide meetings to make sure the project is successful.

Less Well-Known Benefits of Integration Management

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Photo from collectspace.com

Integration management ensures project planning elements are connected properly, regardless of the methodologies being deployed. Here are some other benefits of integration management you might not have thought about:

Ensures accurate status reporting. A well-integrated project plan ensures that status changes are properly reflected throughout the project, no matter where those changes originate. For example, if you mitigate the risk of cost overruns by reducing the use of contracted skilled resources, tasks might take longer, impacting the project schedule. Other skill-related risks could become more likely. Also, product quality may decline. Impacts to the project often extend beyond one element. Sound integration management ensures you have a complete picture of the status of your project. 

Reduces stakeholder conflict. Project managers need to ensure stakeholders understand their obligations to the project. As new ideas or questions arise during the project, stakeholder obligations can change. Performing integration management ensures changes in obligations are identified early. That prevents conflicts later in the project when the pressure is on and project impacts are more significant.

Here’s an example. After your initial requirements are drafted, your contracts team notices that a vendor’s costs will increase considerably because of new demands from your project. To address this, your organization decides to perform the work in-house. This impacts project stakeholders through workload, cost, and schedule. Although it may be the best solution, sound integration management ensures that stakeholders understand the new project projections and workload impacts. That way, they can negotiate with project sponsors to seek other solutions or agree and respond to the new workload. 

Helps you manage in a virtual world. One of the greatest virtual team risks is increased errors in communication or process. In one example, Team A uses metric measurements and a geographically separate Team B used imperial measures, generating costly errors. Although integration doesn’t guarantee error-free processes, integration management activities do reduce risk. Integrated plans and integrated processes help your virtual teams work in lock-step.

Helps you produce accurate project plans. Ensuring that all project planning elements are properly integrated is a great way to ensure a sound project plan. Have you added a risk mitigation strategy in your risk plan but forgot to add budget for it? Have you added tasks to fulfill your quality plan but neglected to add them to your project schedule? Focus on integration management and you are unlikely to see omissions in your plans. Project planning deliverables will be complete, which helps deliver a successful project! 

Do you have examples of integration management providing project benefits? Share them in the comments section.

For more about integration management, check out Oliver Yarborough’s Project Management Foundations: Integration course.

Coming up:

Don’t miss Bonnie’s first LinkedIn Office Hours session of 2022, Leadership is Job One for Project Managers, at 1pm MT, January 25, 2022. Bonnie and bestselling project management author Eric Verzuh will talk about how shifting your focus to project leadership has a direct impact on project value. Bring your project management questions to this session.

Bonnie Biafore and John Riopel will talk about how to manage dependencies, meetings, and overall communication in hybrid projects at their LinkedIn Office Hours session, Managing Dependencies in Hybrid Projects, on February 17, 2022, at 1PM MT. Traditional and agile/iterative project management approaches have similarities and differences, so you might wonder how to manage hybrid projects that use both. Although the approaches differ, there are points within a hybrid project where deliverables need to align. For example, a traditional deliverable must be completed before part of the agile effort can start – or vice versa. Also, even in hybrid projects, the project team is a single team that needs good communication and occasional team-wide meetings to make sure the project is successful.

Less Well-Known Benefits of Scope Management

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Scope management is all about ensuring your project produces what is required — and only what is required — to satisfy project objectives. It also delivers additional benefits you don’t often hear about:

Helps manage risk. Talk to an experienced project manager and you’ll likely hear a hard-earned lesson: the bigger your project, the riskier it becomes. For initiatives that require a lot of organizational change and project deliverables, you can break down scope into phases to make things more manageable. This breakdown into smaller chunks reduces risk and makes it easier for the organization to absorb the changes because they are applied in progressive steps. In many respects, the most effective way to manage project risk is to work closely with your stakeholders to manage scope.

Expands understanding of business requirements. Scope management is best performed through conversation. And conversation not only helps the project team understand business needs, but also helps the business recognize what is straightforward and what is difficult for the project team to produce.

In addition, good scope management means prioritizing requirements. This helps the project team understand what’s vital to the business and can enhance the business’s perspective on its own requirements! So, the business and the project team are better positioned to produce what’s most important, reducing scope and risk.

Builds confidence in the project. Detailed conversations about scope, including well-crafted questions to gain detailed understanding of business needs, can help build stakeholder confidence in the project team’s ability to meet its objectives. Good questions that inspire analysis and understanding of business needs can build trust that the project team knows what needs to be done. And starting off a project with trust from business stakeholders is a big plus.

Helps adapt to available resources. Skill shortages are everywhere and have been amplified by the impacts of the Covid pandemic. Scope management helps everyone be realistic about what can and cannot be done. Discussions about available skills help craft a realistic project schedule. Scope and resource management drive productive discussions about prioritizing work, particularly for scarce resources. The earlier these conversations and prioritizations are made and understood, the easier it will be to build a sound schedule and proceed through the project lifecycle.

Have you obtained other benefits from scope management? If so, share them with us in the comment section.

For more about scope management, check out my Project Management Foundations course.

Coming Up

Don’t miss Bonnie’s first LinkedIn Office Hours session of 2022, Leadership is Job One for Project Managers, at 1pm MT, January 25, 2022. Bonnie and bestselling project management author Eric Verzuh will talk about how shifting your focus to project leadership has a direct impact on project value. Bring your project management questions to this session.

Less Well-known Benefits of Quality Management

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In addition to producing products without errors or functional issues, quality management delivers some additional benefits. Here are a few rarely discussed benefits of quality management:

Defines a fundamental requirement. The information needed to complete a quality plan ensures that you understand a fundamental requirement’s grade. Grade, which represents the degree of optional features available in a product, is a significant element of quality and of the product(s) you produce. The required grade can significantly alter your project approach. For example, an entry level car is one that doesn’t have all the bells and whistles. It includes basic features that helps you get from point A to point B. That is a low-grade vehicle. However, when that entry level car is designed well and lasts a long time, it is a high-quality, low-grade vehicle. In contrast, a top-end luxury car with extra features that breaks down frequently is a low-quality, high-grade vehicle.

The required grade identifies whether the car has a requirement for those multi-way adjustable heated seats! Deliver successful projects by focusing on producing both the desired grade and quality.

Drives fact-based discussions about cost, time, intent and outcomes your project will produce. The degree of quality you build into a product depends on three things; money, time, and skill (and skill costs money.) This interdependence gives the project manager a way to justify requests for additional funding and/or time for higher quality items (which typically require more development, construction, and testing time). In addition, more expensive resources or parts may be required. 

Helps define sound completion criteria. Successful projects share a common characteristic: well-defined completion criteria. The required quality of your deliverables (including grade), components needed, and relevant performance characteristics are vital elements of sound and quantifiable completion criteria.

Protects your reputation. Producing a product for the marketplace without understanding the quality that help it sell would be foolhardy. Producing a deliverable without quality criteria is similar. You’ll waste money and time without proper descriptions of required quality and well-defined quality verification processes. Quality plans protect your business from waste and can highlight the importance of good project management by ensuring that you produce deliverables fit for their purpose. 

Have you achieved other benefits from focusing on quality in your projects? If so, tell us about them in the comments.

For more about quality management , check out Daniel Stanton’s Project Management Foundations: Quality course.

Coming Up

Don’t miss Bonnie’s first LinkedIn Office Hours session of 2022, Leadership is Job One for Project Managers, at 1pm MT, January 25, 2022. Bonnie and bestselling project management author Eric Verzuh will talk about how shifting your focus to project leadership has a direct impact on project value. Bring your project management questions to this session.

Less Well-known Benefits of Communication Management

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Communication management is all about making sure project stakeholders understand the purpose, status, and value the project brings to the business. And it also delivers additional benefits that you don’t often hear about:

  • Greater understanding of stakeholders. Sound communication strategies go both ways and provide excellent opportunities for the project team to understand stakeholder needs and perspectives. This helps create better deliverables today and can help increase the value future projects bring to the business.  In addition, stakeholders who feel understood by the project team are more confident about the current project – as well as in project management as a discipline.
  • Increased project sales prowess. Half the battle for project managers can be selling the value of a project. Executing well-crafted communication plans generates ideas, recognizes business concerns, and identifies valuable business objectives to help define viable projects. 
  • Provides a periodic “project perception management” tool. A foundational piece of a communication plan is the project status report. A status report can shape and manage stakeholder perceptions. Less-experienced project managers view this report as a way to share progress compared to a published plan, which, of course, it is. However, more experienced project managers include other information such as short success stories, opportunities that have arisen, and other news that can improve or reinforce a positive perception of the project and its value to the business. 
  • Identifies vocabulary that gives you the greatest influence. The words stakeholders use to describe business problems and opportunities helps your outgoing project communication to be more meaningful. For example, the information technology lead for your project may draft reports using the phrase “data redundancy and operational integrity.” But if a stakeholder describes their concern with the phrase “data backup and restoration,” it is more effective to use the stakeholder’s terminology in your reports. That way, your communication will be understood and produce the desired reaction.

How have you pushed the benefits of communication within your projects? Share your tips with us in the comments!

For more about communication, check out Tatiana Kolovou and Brenda Bailey-Hughes’s course, Communication Foundations.

Coming Up

Don’t miss Bonnie’s first LinkedIn Office Hours session of 2022, Leadership is Job One for Project Managers, at 1pm MT, January 25, 2022. Bonnie and bestselling project management author Eric Verzuh will talk about how shifting your focus to project leadership has a direct impact on project value. Bring your project management questions to this session.

Resource Management Strategies When Skilled Resources Are in Short Supply

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Skill shortages have made resource management a significant challenge throughout the business world. That means, you need to ensure that your resources deliver the right output when it’s needed. Here are some tips to manage your skilled resources and make that happen.

  • Define workload priority with management. It’s rare to have a team member fully dedicated to your project; multi-tasking is commonplace. As you get team members assigned to your project, work with their managers to prioritize their assignments. That way, you and your team members will be in sync regarding the time they’re allocated to your project. For example, maybe a team member’s number one priority is to help the finance department close the monthly books, and their second priority is to work on your project. The best approach is to refrain from scheduling that team member on your project during the first week of every month. While inconvenient, it isn’t as painful as getting behind schedule because you scheduled your resource when they aren’t available.
  • Select team members whose skills match the difficulty of the task. You get the best results when a team member has skills that align with the difficulty of the work. If the task is too challenging, your team member could struggle, take too long, and become demoralized. Too easy and the task becomes more annoying than enjoyable—plus, this resource could be used to complete a more difficult task. In other words, the “best and brightest” staff member isn’t always the right person for a task.
  • Embrace positive conflict. Project managers sometimes avoid using team members who have a history of conflict with their colleagues. If the issue is a personality clash, it’s appropriate to find someone else. However, if the conflict relates to how to solve a problem or design a solution, conflicting opinions can generate more and better ideas. Although managing this positive conflict takes more time and effort, the project outcomes can be much better as a result. Take a page from the philosophy of former US President Abraham Lincoln; assemble a “team of rivals” to get the best project results.
  • Temporarily trade duties with team leaders or technical managers. Some team leaders and technical managers often wish they could drop their leadership and administrative duties and return to producing technical deliverables. Why not give them a chance to do just that? As a project manager, I’ve often temporarily taken administrative duties from a team leader or manager in exchange for them working on a technical task on my project. That gives a valuable resource the opportunity to practice their craft, and you get a better result for your project. It’s a win-win!

Do you have any tips or tricks for using skilled resources to the best advantage? Add them in the comments section!

For more about resource management, check out Daniel Stanton’s Project Management Foundations: Teams course.

Less Well-known Benefits of Procurement Management

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Procurement management is all about bringing control to acquisition of parts and skills required for projects. But it also delivers additional benefits that you don’t often hear about:

Find long-term partners. Organizations often require parts or skill-based services on an ongoing basis. Well-crafted Requests for Quotation (RFQ) or Requests for Proposal (RFP) enable vendors to share their skills and abilities as well as the culture and business approach they take to serve their clients. Your RFQ or RFP can not only reveal the best alternative for your current need and can also identify a go-to business partner for the future.

Identify other solution options. Speaking of RFPs and RFQs, send requests that encourages vendors to provide a response to your specific solution request along with alternative solutions. That way, you might discover ways to address business needs better. The information you get can draw attention to the potential for a long-term business partnership (see point 1). 

Discover skill mixes available in the marketplace. While working on a leading-edge technical project, a vendor introduced me to a technical-skill mix that I didn’t know existed. I worked with my procurement team to describe the technical installation skills I needed to implement a set of technical tools. The vendor proposed experts with both technical implementation expertise and business analysis background required to fully configure and implement our tools more efficiently than if we did it ourselves. This skill mix decreased the project’s forecasted duration and made for a stronger business case to launch the project.

Support an efficient supply chain. Supply chain challenges are everywhere today, affecting virtually every business. The entry point to your supply chain is the vendor(s) who provide parts and products for your project. Being mindful of your supply chain requirements and performing sound procurement management helps you select vendors who can minimize or eliminate supply chain issues that can impact your project outcomes.

If you have other benefits you have obtained from procurement management, share them with your fellow project managers by posting in the comment section.

For more about procurement management, check out Oliver Yarbrough’s Project Management Foundations: Procurement course.

Less Well-known Benefits of Risk Management

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Project management disciplines such as risk management bring control to a project. In addition to the well-known benefits of these disciplines, they provide other benefits that aren’t often discussed or recognized. Here are a few additional benefits that risk management provides:

Encourages optimism. Thinking about what could go wrong increases optimism? It seems counter-intuitive, and yet it does! Plans for responding to risks can encourage the team. Whatever may arise, you have already identified an action to take! In addition, planning for positive risks (also called opportunities) can increase the chance of good things happening and ensure that you make the most of them when they do. That’s certainly cause for optimism! 

Reduces pressure. Project managers face enough pressure without having to develop solutions to issues on a moment’s notice. With risk management, you will have pre-planned responses to events that occur: you’re ready to execute the plan so the team can take action quickly.

Even if a problem arises that isn’t in your risk management plan, a team that’s used to managing risk can jump in to discuss alternatives and develop responses. You do not have to deal with it alone!

Identifies possibilities. Productive risk identification and response planning meetings can unearth more than doom and gloom responses. You might launch risk-reducing actions proactively, which not only addresses risks, but can also increase project value. For example, say you proactively engage a skilled resource to reduce risk. That person’s skill and experience might uncover possible solutions that expand the value the project delivers to the business.

Increases focus on outcomes. Focusing the project team on risk regularly during status meetings keeps the project purpose front of mind. While project team members naturally focus on their specific tasks, risk management provides focus on what might jeopardize project outcomes, and how team members can work with each other and management to produce project outcomes as planned.

Have you come across other benefits of risk management that aren’t typically discussed?

For more about risk management, check out Bob McGannon’s Project Management Foundations: Risk course.

Less Well-known Benefits of Cost Management

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Besides controlling the spending for a project, cost management delivers some additional benefits. Here are a few rarely discussed benefits of cost management: 

Filters out wannabe stakeholders. Project managers should embrace the phrase “you gotta pay to play!” In other words, if stakeholders want their requirements considered for the project, they need to provide funding to deliver what they require. With cost management practices, you can ensure that the project receives acceptable cost-benefit ratios from every request. It also helps ensure unfunded requirements won’t burden your project.

Provides leverage to control change. Cost management can help prevent scope creep! Change request processing includes evaluating schedule and cost impact. That cost management aspect of change management means you have the data you need to say no to project stakeholders when they come up with ideas they can’t cost-justify. 

Enables managing project speed or agile velocity. You know stakeholders are fond of asking for projects to be delivered sooner. Delivering the full project scope more quickly typically means higher cost. You can control the pace and integrity of delivery by asking whether funding is available for the early delivery and whether that extra cost makes sense. Without committed additional funding, fast delivery will skew your triple constraints and move your project status to yellow — or even red.

Similar approaches exist in agile environments. Because cost and time start are initially fixed based on the number of staff and planned sprints, delivering more features means more people or more time, both of which cost more. Before speeding up feature delivery, make sure the stakeholders can justify the request. 

Helps prevent inappropriate projects from being selected. When a client launches a project without proper cost management, they’re likely to discover that the project outcomes don’t save time or money. Proper cost management can stop “dud” projects that aren’t worth the money or effort. In addition, it supports the tactic, “if you’re going to fail, fail fast.”

Have you come across other benefits of cost management in your projects? If so, add them in the comments section.

For more about project cost management, check out Bob McGannon’s Project Management Foundations: Budgets course.

Less Well-known Benefits of Schedule Management

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Besides bringing control to your project schedule, schedule management delivers additional benefits. Here are a few rarely-discussed benefits of schedule management. 

Defines elephant bites. The adage about eating an elephant one bite at a time works with projects, too. However, the phrase doesn’t mean much unless those bites are defined and are seen as reasonable. The work breakdown structure – as the basis for the overall project schedule – is the perfect tool for defining reasonable bites. Tasks represent the small chunks or bites that need to be produced to deliver the project. A good schedule helps you deliver a project successfully, because people can grasp those small bites and how their tasks contribute to the overall project objective.

Facilitates great how-to discussions. A company’s IT upgrade project team faced a dilemma: should they upgrade the network connections first, then the PCs, or the other way around? While there were technical pros and cons to each option, the schedule ultimately decided the sequence. Vendor resource restrictions determined the best approach — in some parts of the business, the PCs were upgraded first; and in others, the network was upgraded before the PCs. Without considering the schedule in the decision, it would have taken longer to complete the project. A better approach to completing the project was identified because of scheduling discussions.

Provides a defense against unreasonable expectations. A common challenge for project managers is handling expectations of the timeframe required to deliver project outcomes. The best tool for fact-based discussion of timeframe is a set of tasks defined and sequenced along with a reasonable time estimate for each task. That discussion becomes even more powerful if you’ve captured history of task completions, which reinforces your estimates for the current project. If the timeframe is too long,  you can use that information to ask your sponsor which tasks to cut or convey the risk from reducing the hours allocated to a task.

Gives you a map! Successful initiatives all share a common trait — there is a known and understood path from where things stand today to where you want to be. For projects, a sound schedule is that map. A complete schedule includes milestones and closing tasks, which serve as “X marks the spot” tasks that tie things together and confirm you’ve reached the treasure you were seeking. 

Have you come across schedule management benefits?

For more about schedule management, check out my Project Management Foundations: Schedules course. You might also want to watch my recent LinkedIn Office Hours session about evaluating schedule quality.