Posts tagged as:

stakeholders

Manage Your Least Favorite Stakeholder

by Alec Satin

“Stakeholder Management” is one of those terms that could easily be removed from our project management vocabulary. The next time you hear it in conversation imagine that what was really said was “stakeholder manipulation”. Would the sentence still make sense?
People are smart. Manipulation seldom works in the long run, and especially in complicated group endeavors like most technology projects.
Stakeholder as Enemy
When did it become acceptable to have an US versus THEM attitude in regard to our stakeholders? I remember counseling a fellow project manager about a web content project he was managing. The gist of the conversation was how bad [...]

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Free Project Management Tool – The Promise Keeper

by Alec Satin

Jump to free downloads
Does PMP certification make a better project manager? When Raven Young asked this question, opinions varied.
Does Microsoft Project, the de facto project management software standard, improve IT project performance? I challenge anyone to show me proof of a strong correlation between how good you are as a project manager, and the cost of the tools that you use.
Some of the best project managers use the simplest tools. Many of us who are efficiency software and tool junkies have come full circle and selectively reincorporated paper-based task systems into our personal workflows.
As part of the primary mission of [...]

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Pleasing Stakeholders Linkfest: Everything You Ever Wanted To Know But Were Afraid To Ask.

by Alec Satin

(Okay, perhaps not everything. And perhaps you didn’t want to know. But please keep reading – this may be of interest to you.)
Why a Stakeholder Linkfest
This past week I took part in three different conversations in which the success (and in one case failure) of a project could be related back to the relationship the project manager had with the stakeholders.
Key to your success as a project manager is your ability to understand the opportunities, desires and needs of your stakeholders. You may know this intellectually, but is it part of your day to day practice? How well do you [...]

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10 Ways to Destroy the Effectiveness of Your Project Management Office (PMO)

by Alec Satin

For every PMO that delivers on its initial promise, there are two that hobble along, never really achieving much in terms of bottom-line benefit to customers, project managers, stakeholders or the business itself.
It’s pretty easy to eliminate most if not all benefits of a Project Management Office. Which of the following hold true for your PMO?

Make sure to set up a climate of fear. Emphasize the penalties of non-compliance. Use the stick and not the carrot.
Make sure to locate the program office as far away from the project managers as possible. Extra points if you make communication hard by limiting [...]

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