Dealing with stakeholders that are always busy and do not attend meetings
Venkat GadwalaPMP, CSM, ITIL| Service Delivery, Operations Management and Project ManagementChantilly, Va, United States
In one of my recent projects, a few key stakeholders did not attend touchpoint/status meetings regularly. Sometimes they attend by phone and it is very hard to read how engaged they are. Working with my program manager, we escalated it to one of our key customer stakeholders and we still did not get necessary engagement.
Could you share any experiences like this and what helped you solved those? Appreciate your time and suggestions. Saving Changes...
Venkat:
Just a few questions;
Did you do a stakeholder analysis/mapping?
Are you satisfying the communication required by the stakeholder?
Did you set expectations on attendance by key stakeholder or their stand in?
Can you reach out to this stakeholder in person or directly?
What is the current issue beside their lack of attendance?
Besides attendance; how do you know this stakeholder is not engaged? What is your definition for necessary engagement from this stakeholder?
Sharing more information may help with feedback and insights. Saving Changes...
This is one of the key project risk...
It should be reflected in status reports..
PM should raise red alert to senior management on this points and notify the impact and bring back to the track.......... Saving Changes...
S RajasekarSenior Project Manager| AllscriptsBangalore, Karnataka, India
I had experienced this in few of my projects as well ,tried different things there is no single option ,it depends on the person/Project environment/organizations
1. Have 1:1 with them, understand their Interest, Availability, importance..etc
2. Continuous escalation: mail, follow up, status report..etc
3. Find an alternative person/nomination if possible
4. Last option stall all project activities and communicate without their participation/input can't proceed Saving Changes...
Product Operations Program ManagerBarcelona, Cataluña, Spain
As some people already stressed, it is important to analyze the interest and power of this stakeholder in the project. Perhaps it would be enough to keep him/her informed - on the contrary, if he/she has high power and interest in the project and yet is not committed, a f2f meeting is the way to go, followed by escalation if necessary. Saving Changes...
Sergio Luis ConteHelping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based OrganizationsBuenos Aires, Argentina
If people do not perceive value then it is nothing to do. As project manager you are in charge of that. And the only way to work with that is to perform stakeholder management activities. Saving Changes...
Venkat GadwalaPMP, CSM, ITIL| Service Delivery, Operations Management and Project ManagementChantilly, Va, United States
Thank you all for the responses.
The way I knew there was lack of enough engagement was, some of the decisions were taking much longer to be made than planned. I have done things like status reporting, emails, escalations.
Part of the problem here is, the nature of the project. It was to transition work performed by their organization. Stakeholder mapping was (re)validated after noticing these issues. We found there was a significant change in the power/interest due to a of hidden stakeholder. Once we discovered that, we started addressing that stakeholder and it brought in better results. Saving Changes...
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