What is your stakeholder’s political agenda?

 

An Influential Project Manager knows a great deal about their stakeholders, and makes and effort to keep learning more.

Political agendas represent the overall personal strategy that a stakeholder adopts to further their goals. It is formulated and influenced by many things, including their career history, and their career ambitions.

To explore more about their agenda, learn about where they have worked, what companies, countries, functions, professions and on what projects. Think about who they have worked with in the past, who hired them and where they are planning to go next.

You may not find this easy to find out, but keep these questions in mind as you turn on your political radar.

• Think of a key stakeholder. Write down their career history.
• How is their history influencing their current work?
• What can you guess about where they want to go next?
• How can you fill in the gaps in your insight?

The accumulation of these political insights will help you to learn how to adapt your pitches, your reports and your engagement so that it more easily aligns with what they are trying to do. That’s when influence become easy.