Making Projects Work: Effective Stakeholder and Communication Management

Introduction

The high point of my career in project management came in the late 1990s when I managed a project that really was successful. Everybody wanted it, and everybody was prepared to contribute to its successful implementation. My team and I received as much cooperation from all our stakeholders as we could desire. This project succeeded because everybody wanted the outcomes of the project and were prepared to collaborate with us to achieve them. They were willing to work with us to ensure that their needs were met—and they knew what they wanted.

My project was the development of an interface between the project management software selected by the organization (and loved by the project managers) and a corporate-wide enterprise resource ...