Toddlers Are the Toughest Stakeholders

Mike Donoghue is a member of a multinational information technology corporation where he collaborates on the communications guidelines and customer relationship strategies affecting the interactions with internal and external clients. He has analyzed, defined, designed and overseen processes for various engagements including product usability and customer satisfaction, best practice enterprise standardization, relationship/branding structures, and distribution effectiveness and direction. He has also established corporate library solutions to provide frameworks for sales, marketing, training, and support divisions.

  Change Management   Communications Management   Requirements Management   Stakeholder Management  

To be a project manager means being proud of your ability to handle the challenges of demanding higher-ups, suspicious customers, and team members spread out geographically and in a variety of time zones.

You may think you’ve mastered all forms of difficult personalities, but will your skills be put to the test when you face the toughest stakeholder of them all: the toddler.

Certainly, those little “bundles of joy” are cute from afar, but when you get a little closer to them you can see how their sticky hands, messy faces, and cast-iron wills can pose a strong test to your management acumen. By comparison, your CFO is a cuddly bunny.

Requirements Gathering
When you start a project, you begin by obtaining requirements. Not too dissimilar from what you do with toddlers (for example, “What do you want for a snack?”).

For the young folk, be prepared for rapid changes like: “Fish crackers.” And then, “Wait, I mean peanut butter pretzels.” And then an emotional and transitional moment of “I wanted fish crackers, but NOT THAT FLAVOR.”

This is the epitome of scope creep. You thought the “project” was finalized (with Chicken McNuggets), but it then morphed into animal-shaped pieces of cheese, three peach slices (not four), and cranberry juice in the green cup (not the yellow one).

As soon as…

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