Chapter 21. Getting the Stakeholders You Deserve

"Remember, no matter where you are ”there you are."

” Pig Killer (Robert Grubb) ^[1]

^[1] Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, George Miller and George Ogilvie, Directors; Terry Hayes, Writer, 1985.

This resource is a tutorial on various considerations that an effective project manager must understand to be able to obtain real commitment from his or her stakeholders. They all deal with organization politics and relationships between people.

It is one of the great paradoxes of organizations that they assign project managers to manage $10,000,000 projects and give them almost no power or authority. We have reviewed many projects in which the limit of the project manager's financial authority was less than $500.

As a result, advanced project managers must learn to use what limited power and authority they have, coupled with any other tricks available, to ensure that they get the level of support they need from other people.