A Practical Guide to Dealing with Difficult Stakeholders

Jake Holloway, David Bryde

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781351962025
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

All project stakeholders have different needs, objectives, responsibilities and priorities. For many project managers it is disturbing to realise that, for any number of personal or professional reasons, some of their stakeholders may not be as co-operative and helpful as they expect. It could be a negative and powerful sponsor (the 'Anti-sponsor'), a demotivated team, low-maturity or unrealistic external clients, maliciously compliant gatekeepers and finance teams, or uninterested internal customers. The reality of project management is that stakeholders can be difficult! Jake Holloway, Professor David Bryde and Roger Joby bring their years of project management experience and combine it with research and insight from social psychology to delve into how and why project stakeholders can be difficult. The book describes some of the common stakeholder types - such as Sponsors, the Team, Gatekeepers, Clients and Contractors - and associated unhelpful or difficult behaviour profiles that you will often come across on projects. It then provides practical ideas, techniques and methods that will help the project manager to effectively manage the impact of these stakeholders on the project. As projects get larger and more complicated, the role and influence of stakeholders grows too. A Practical Guide to Dealing with Difficult Stakeholders will provide your project teams with the basis for a more sophisticated and resilient approach to stakeholder management.

CHAPTER 1
Project Stakeholders

Introduction

Every project manager knows instinctively that their role is as much about dealing with the people in and around their project as it is about project management methodologies, managing schedules, creating resource plans and generally being organised. While there is increasing focus in project management literature on the subject of Stakeholders, very little has been written about dealing with the variety of people-related problems that every project manager faces – such as difficult internal or external Customers, de-motivated Teams, aggressively unhelpful senior managers, lazy project Sponsors and unhelpful Gatekeepers.

Conventional textbooks take a fairly mechanistic perspective in seeing that Stakeholders, including those that might be difficult and working against The Project, can be dealt with simply by following a defined process. But do these process-oriented stakeholder engagement strategies work in the real world? Do they deal with behaviours such as jealousy, manipulation, undermining, mutiny and demotivation? Will they help you persuade everyone that your project is a success, whether it is or not?

This practical and informative guide is about the challenges of dealing with difficult and unhelpful people, or Stakeholders, at every level of The Project, from project Sponsors to Team members. It draws on the experience of three experienced project managers with hundreds of projects under their belts and backs up their pragmatic observations and suggestions with underpinning references to social psychology theory and research.

Defining a Project Stakeholder

We define a project Stakeholder as “any person or group who can impact the cost, schedule, specification, resourcing, outcome or perceived success of a Project”. We have deliberately chosen a broad definition and introduce the concept of perceived as opposed to measureable success. Organisations within which projects exist are made up of people – and these people do not necessarily expect or even want the Project to succeed. Some may see success where the reality is that The Project has failed in many ways. This is the nature of human behaviour. Successful engagement with project Stakeholders is about ensuring that the perception of your project is what you hoped for, as much as achieving any objective, measureable outcome.

The term Stakeholder is accurate in that it generically describes groups or individuals who have a stake in the outcome of the Project. However, it can also be misleading and impersonal. It implies faceless groups of impartial but interested parties who are simply carrying out their role or operating their process. It gives little insight into the fact that these people and groups will make or break your project. After all, they are paying for the Project, receiving it, buying it, measuring it, taking executive responsibility for it and probably helping you deliver it. Clearly, the more supportive, effective, powerful and accessible they are – the more important they are as Stakeholders.

Without understanding the project Stakeholders, you are unlikely to be able to communicate with them, persuade them, engage them or manage them. More importantly, you will not be able to prioritise your engagement with them. Time is limited – and dealing with Stakeholders can be very timeconsuming. Prioritising the Stakeholders will help you get the best out of them for the time expended.

Textbook v Reality of Project Management

When new project managers are learning standard methods, attending project management classes and reading textbooks, they are presented with a perfect world where all projects start at the beginning, all issues have owners and resolutions, all risks are identifiable and, crucially, all participants in the Project behave rationally and compliantly. More seasoned project managers understand that the world doesn’t always work like that – particularly when it comes to stakeholder engagement.

Our viewpoint of the topic very much reflects the Human Relations School, pioneered by Chester Barnard in the 1930s, that sees the organisation as comprised of natural groups, as opposed to the groups and Teams defined by management, with complex information flows and authority in part originating from below, that is, in the power of individual project Teams to under or overachieve against targets. The reality of human behaviour at work is that people are not always rational and compliant, which is why the best project managers are not the ones fresh out of training or with the latest methodologies, but the ones who have been through project after project, learning how to deal with the different types of Stakeholder as best they can.

Do not misunderstand us. We believe that managing projects properly and methodically is the best way to achieve success. However, we also believe that, to be consistently successful, you have to go beyond the project management process and deal with the people involved as well; which means understanding how they think, why they behave as they do and, sometimes, how to persuade them to change their behaviour.

Table 1.1 outlines some of the differences between the perfect textbook world of most project management theory and the realities that you might face. By being aware of the potential pitfalls that exist in the real world of projects you are preparing yourself to deal with them – as none are insurmountable.

This picture may appear discouraging and bleak but it is also empowering. By understanding why Stakeholders behave the way they do in reality you can start to change the picture. By being prepared to go beyond Gantt charts and Issue logs and into the complex area of human behaviour, you can start to be a more effective project manager.

Categorising Project Stakeholders

There are several ways in which Stakeholders can be categorised. Naturally, the amount of authority they wield and how directly accountable they are for the Project is essential and these elements are present in most stakeholder classifications. Much of the literature on stakeholder categorisation is built upon the work of Mitchell, Agle and Wood in the 1990s, with salience being a function of Power, Legitimacy and Urgency (Mitchell, et al. 1997). So Stakeholders with the highest salience are those that have the greatest power to influence the outcomes from the Project, a clear legitimate right to have their opinions and views taken into account when making decisions about the Project and a great sense of urgency in seeing the Project carried out.

However most attempts at stakeholder categorisation have ignored some important dimensions and, in particular, stakeholder behaviours; for example, a lack of support they have towards the Project, or even towards you as an individual.

We have created a simple categorisation of stakeholder types, based on their relationship with the Project, and added sub-types and the issues that you may face from them. This is shown in Table 1.2. As shown in Table 1.2, for example, Chapter 2 contains information about the project Sponsor Stakeholder type and within that broad category there are two sub-types: hidden or secret Sponsor and Anti-sponsor.

Table 1.1 Textbook v Reality

Textbook	Reality
Projects are started because there is a business case or positive outcome identified and the detailed plan shows that there will be a positive Return on Investment (ROI).	Projects are started because one or more powerful Stakeholders want it to start. They believe that a positive ROI should be achieved (probably by you, the project manager) but have little or no evidence that it’s possible.
Stakeholders are universally supportive of all projects that have a positive projected outcome.	Stakeholders support, are indifferent towards or oppose projects based on a mix of personal and professional reasons. Often they are unhelpful or difficult.
All Stakeholders can be engaged as long as you “identify their needs”, “resolve their issues” and “communicate effectively”	Some Stakeholders cannot be persuaded to do anything to help the Project, while others will try to undermine it. In the end, stakeholder management is a difficult game of percentages not a process.
Stakeholders understand the importance of the Project and will assign time and resources accordingly.	Most Stakeholders don’t particularly care about the Project as they have a myriad of other priorities and none will assign it as much time as you think they should.
Stakeholders always behave rationally.	Stakeholders think they behave rationally – but they get to define what “rationally” means.
Organisations have shared values which will bear on how the Project operates.	Individuals have values, which will definitely impact on how the Project operates.
Organisations have a mission and objectives, which are broken down into supporting objectives owned by each department, group and project – which keeps everyone “on the same side” and “rowing in the same direction”.	Group, project and individual objectives can be contradictory – and are not always the same as the ones written down.
Reporting an accurate picture of project performance, issues and risks is encouraged at all levels of the organisation.	There are many circumstances where accurate project reporting is prevented for personal or professional reasons by one or more Stakeholders. Particularly if they said the Project would have a positive outcome without much thought or planning – and it isn’t working out that way.

Table 1.2 Type of Stakeholder (and where covered in the book)

Stakeholder type	Sub-types
Project Sponsor (Chapter 2)	Hidden Sponsor Anti-sponsor
Project Team and team members (Chapter 3)	Demotivated Team Bored Team Distracted Team Frustrated Team Disharmonious Team Geographically split Team Team under pressure Team on unpopular project Mutinous Team
External Stakeholder – Clients and Contractors (Chapter 4)	External Client External Contractor Client and Contractor with different levels of maturity
Internal Customers and Gatekeepers (Chapter 5)	Internal Customer – Operational Team Gatekeepers Maliciously compliant Gatekeeper Project and service management process owner The finance department

Whilst we devote particular chapters and sub-sections to different stakeholder types it is worth noting that,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Project Stakeholders
• 2 The Project Sponsor
• 3 The Project Team
• 4 External Clients and Contractors
• 5 Internal Customers and Gatekeepers
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index