Even though the concept of project stakeholder management may be easy to understand, our experience is that most people find it rather difficult to master in practice. Ethical considerations such as trade-offs between stakeholders are not the only challenge you will encounter in carrying out project management. You may also face challenges when trying to allocate your own time between planning ahead and solving the problems that will arise along the way, regardless of how thorough the original planning has been. If too much time is spent on planning there will be no resources left for the daily tasks. On the other hand, if plans are not made on a proper basis and revised along the way, there will be too many daily problems to solve. You can easily be torn in a dilemma between spending time doing in-depth analysis and planning and the need to get the project rolling. Accordingly, you will, to some extent, need to rely on intuition and superficial analysis. To keep costs in time and money within reasonable levels you should carefully consider which stakeholders are sufficiently important to warrant spending time gathering information concerning expectations and concerns. You may also decide to make a detailed analysis of only those stakeholders that are important in the early stages of the process and postpone preparing a detailed register for additional stakeholders until they become important.

Also the process of generating inputs for the stakeholder analysis can be quite challenging. Information can only be gathered if it exists. The stakeholders can only share their requirements, wishes and concerns if they are aware of them and willing and able to articulate them when asked. This means that sometimes important information about stakeholders cannot be revealed through the techniques recommended for the stakeholder analysis. Workshops, interviews and other forms of information sharing may help stakeholders become aware of their thoughts regarding the project. You may find inspiration for how to conduct such information sharing in the techniques presented for creation of input for the stakeholder assessment. Also, think about that questions asked in an interview or a conversation about a topic may trigger the interviewee to reflect on the topic in question, and he or she will be able to answer the question in a later follow-up interview (Jepsen and Eskerod 2009).

Input generation is not the only challenging task. Communication within the project team and with the stakeholders may be complicated by differences in backgrounds and a weak ‘project culture’ if participants have not met before the project starts. There may not be a common vocabulary. Further, acceptable modes of conduct are often not dictated by company culture but must be established at the beginning of the project. In addition, the stakeholders may have different perceptions of value in terms of what is regarded as good reasons for spending resources. They may have prejudices against each other and against you and the project team. We tend to form opinions based on generalizations and stereotypes (Schiffman and Kanuk 2009). For example, a designer may have a certain opinion about engineers and vice versa. Therefore, the two groups of stakeholders may not see the ‘real people’ behind the role and do not really listen to what the other group says.

The insights and tools presented in this book give advice on elements to cover in stakeholder management planning. There are, however, challenges in using the guidelines, especially in terms of identification of the stakeholders and discovery of their expectations of the benefits that they will expect in exchange for their contribution. It can also be difficult to distinguish important stakeholders from not-so-important stakeholders. To accomplish these tasks, you need to undertake desk and field research. This is time consuming and it is challenging to approach and interview important stakeholders to learn the kind and level of attention that they need.

Stakeholder analysis and planning should be an iterative process rather than simply a one-off task carried out mainly as a desk research at the front-end of the project. Project stakeholder management takes place across the entire life cycle of the project. The life cycle may be different in various project types. In some projects it may be impossible and even catastrophic to attempt to settle for a fixed project stakeholder plan at an early stage because there are so many unknown factors. This makes it important to validate and, where possible, update the plan during the project execution phase. The plan is a document based on interpretations of the stakeholders and the project made at a certain point in time. It should, therefore, not be treated as a static entity or ‘universal truth’.

Project success is multidimensional. This creates a challenge in terms of the softer criteria for project success. These may be difficult to reconcile as many of the expected exchanges between the project manager and the stakeholders may not be explicit – for example in the case of process-related issues, that is how the stakeholder prefers that the communication takes place, or with which member of the project organization the stakeholder would prefer to deal. A stakeholder may find it inappropriate to communicate through a young and inexperienced project team member instead of the project manager or even the project owner. Formal contracts (if they exist at all) and project documents, such as the project charter, typically only include some of the expected exchanges within the project. The personal and organizational expectations which stakeholders have are often unarticulated and sometimes the stakeholders are not even consciously aware of these additional expectations. In addition they may change during the project’s life cycle. Further, it is likely that the members of the project organization and the other stakeholders will meet again in the future. And, indeed, some of the stakeholders may have met during earlier projects, potentially easing the job for you. This potential to collaborate more than once leads to a suggestion that project managers should take a relationship approach to stakeholder management rather than a transactional approach which focuses on optimization within the present project. Taking a relationship approach still requires you to keep focus on the success of the project at hand but equally to consider the positive and negative effects of your decisions on future relationships with the stakeholders. You need to reflect on the importance of each stakeholder now and in the future and that also intangible outcomes, for example loss of trust and damaged esteem, can have an impact. To some people, these personal, intangible outcomes may be more important for future relationships than the optimal delivery of all the project deliverables.

In spite of the challenges in planning stakeholder management efforts, we think that the proactive project manager should see the analysis and planning as more than simply resource-demanding activities. They represent an ongoing learning process and an opportunity to engage in dialogue with the stakeholders to gather their thoughts about the project at an early stage. By choosing this perspective for stakeholder management we think that stakeholder analysis and planning can make a great contribution to the success of any project. We hope that the guidelines presented in this book will provide a good conceptual framework for doing so.

In summary, stakeholder management is by no means a ‘hard science’ with causeand-effect relations and we have not tried to give clear cut answers on how to manage stakeholders in all situations. We hope that this book and the insights and tools it offers will be beneficial for you – not least as an opportunity to become aware of your own potentially unconscious assumptions of how to deal with your project stakeholders.