Adding impact to your Poject Management Skills

How to Simplify Stakeholder Management using your Communication Skills

The job of a Project Manager is anything but easy. Balancing the conflicting components of the triple constraint (schedule, cost, scope, quality, risk, customer satisfaction) and add to that the struggle to satisfy executive management & your team members, it often feels like one is fighting a loosing battle.

Communicating the impact of changes or demands to different stakeholders can become an indispensable tool in this fight. After all, not satisfying stakeholders’ needs could result in influential people putting boulders in your path, whereas agreeing to everyone’s demands will result in either one, or many, of the following: scope creep, schedule delay, cost over-runs, decreased quality, unidentified risks or a dissatisfied customer.

Considering that the Project Manager ‘needs’ to be pro-active and ‘needs’ to anticipate problems, here’s how you can foresee your stakeholders’ demands and be ready to communicate how fulfilling their demands will hurt their own interests.

Customer Expecting Gold Plating
In many industries, this is not very uncommon, either due to a pre-existing trend, failure to define & communicate scope or just a demanding customer. To deal with this situation a project manager needs to have knowledge of the scope in the contract, the pricing, and what impact the customer demands will have on the Project Goals. Obviously adding functionality to a product or performing more services than in the contract will have an impact on the schedule, (someone’s) cost, and could even in some cases decrease quality etc. Once equipped with all this knowledge, all the Project Manager has to do is to communicate how fulfilling the customer’s request will ultimately hurt the projects goals. Once this notification is made by the Project Manager using formal written communications, the customer will back down.

Executive Management Cutting Resources
Executive Management keeps their eyes on the bottom line, and, often, the resources spent in executing a project (especially while ramping up exponentially to meet deadlines) do not appear to translate into good ROI. This is a scenario where the Project Manager can use different progress reports to demonstrate how the project is on track and how cutting back on resources at this stage will ultimately result in greater investments to undo any damage caused by resource shortage, overloading of workers or use of substandard materials.

Politics & Issues of Ethics
There are some scenarios in Projects that every Project Manager will come to face, sooner or later, that are so critical that the decisions made by the Project manager will determine their continuation on the project. Scenarios like, an executive having an existing relationship with a supplier and demanding the use of such a supplier. Or someone with influence requesting the removal of a key team member due to personality differences.

In Scenarios like these, even though there is no silver bullet that will result in the whole situation going away, many consequences can be minimized by putting in formal writing, the impact on quality in the project that will be brought about by using an inferior supplier or, the impact on schedule that will be brought due to the absence of a key team member whose removal is being required.

Cover Your Bases
Even though communicating the impact of stakeholders’ demands will not always result in tables being turned in your favor, at the least, it will arm you with a written document that you can point to and say ‘I told you so!’, once your warnings become reality.

© 2009 Saad Farooqi