Managing Stakeholders Can Be Tricky!

"Managing stakeholders is so critical if you want your project to be successful"

We often hear the arguments on LinkedIn groups, should a Project Manager be a domain expert or not?

Within the  Project Management Institute, there is the concept of the Talent Triangle for Project Management capacity building.

An important area I want to highlight is the technical part of it.

On a recent Software Implementation Contract Project, this came to play. Applying technical skills is so important if you want your project to be successful.

The project had my team and I interface with another key contractor who we met on ground.  We tried to engage with this contractor from the word go but it seemed he had other personal plans for the project.  He and his team were largely uncooperative.

In retrospect we started engaging project stakeholders on the project early and it helped us work and some level of progress.

Some of the internal teams in the organization had no clue about this novel project and the key contractor kept playing to their intelligence since they were not Tech Savvy.

After major parts of the project had been completed, we decided to go live that is launch the project.

Payments on the platform were supposed to be split with the sharing formula agreed on our Memorandum of Understanding [M.O.U] but the contractor ensured no split happened on the point of payment. They agreed to split later after project launch.

We all trusted that they will provide the right reports and also ensure the fees were split according to the agreements.

However, on the first-third launch of the products online the reports to the organization shared by the Contractor did not match our own internal reports having used Google Analytics a technical tool by Google that helps track every single page on websites it helped us see from the backend what was actually going on.

Our team questioned the results of the launches with the project owners and the contractor. An investigation started that helped to open up a can of worms on the dishonest contractor who defrauded both the project owner and our team.

A lesson learned here is to know the ins and outs of the technical parts of your project.  The data proved beyond doubt that the contractor was fraudulent and he and team were fired from the project.

Are you aware of the technical parts of your project?