Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
Faites Attention, Stakeholders!
Ian Whittingham, PMP is director of Calixo Consulting, providing project and program management expertise from initiation through to implementation, covering business transformation, workflow process re-engineering, and enterprise data integration. He is a regular contributor to ProjectManagement.com. You may contact Ian directly at [email protected].
As he stepped into the classroom, the alien sound of his uncompromising imperative--“Faites attention! Cessez le bavardage!”--stunned our babbling voices to silence. Boisterous and unruly sixth graders, none of us knew exactly what those strange words meant. Yet the cessation of our chattering signified we had understood his injunction. And that was our introduction to the French language on the first day of a new school year. Today, the fact that this encounter is still vivid in my memory--very many years after the event--carries another lesson in the management of stakeholder expectation.
Each project presents us with a new combination of stakeholders. We may be dealing with groups or individuals with whom we have worked on previous projects. However, every project introduces some requirements that modify or change pre-existing interactions between familiar stakeholders. This is one important reason why a RACI Matrix analysis should always be performed for every project: to determine if stakeholder roles or relationships from a previous, similar project are still valid for the current project; and to identify how the requirements of the new, current project modify those presumed relationships and roles. (For more on the analysis of stakeholder relationships, see Stakeholder Relational Values.)
Although RACI analysis is necessary to analyze the …
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"It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. " - Albert Einstein |