Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
Extreme Stakeholder Management
Doug is the author of the landmark book, Extreme Project Management®: Using Leadership, Principles and Tools to Deliver Value in the Face of Volatility. He works with clients who undertake projects in very demanding environments: those settings that feature high speed, high change, high unpredictability and high stress. Doug has lived in the trenches—from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to Beijing, China—with over 275 project teams with budgets that ranged from $25,000 to over $25 million. He is one of the founders of the Agile Leadership Network, an organization dedicated to connecting, developing and supporting great project leaders. He is known for his hard-hitting and humorous keynote speeches that address vital issues facing today’s project-based organizations. You can visit Doug at www.dougdecarlo.com.
It’s Politics as Usual
A stakeholder is anyone who can impact a project before or after completion. Stakeholders can be internal or external to the organization.
The challenge of stakeholder management is that not everyone is enthusiastic about the project. Extreme projects tend to create winners and losers. For example, in a process re-engineering project, new jobs will be created, others will change and still others will be lost.
As such, extreme project are often marinated in politics. Furthermore, the politics can be compounded the sheer numbers of stakeholders involved. Effective stakeholder management, which I refer to as relationship management, is the soft glue that holds the project together.
Table 1: Project Stakeholders
|
You
|
Consumers
|
|
Your family
|
General public
|
|
The core project team
|
Subject matter experts
|
|
Other project managers
|
Project facilitator
|
|
Project sponsor
|
… |
Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.
ADVERTISEMENTS
|
"The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made." - Groucho Marx |