If you’ve managed Projects for some time, you will soon notice that many elements will never be mentioned in the PMBOK. Only reality can teach you those elements. Although the PMBOK will talk about stakeholder management, how to analyse and map out your stakeholders and finally a stakeholder engagement plan. It’s a bit silence on how the actual scenarios play out.
Stakeholders have power (influence and control), stakeholders also have interests. Perhaps important to also say, that two stakeholders, with an equal amount of power can have such divergent interests. A Project manager must find a way of addressing these interests without affecting the progress of the project. But what if these interests are to completely alter the scope of the project? It’s times such as these that test the political abilities of the Project Manager.
Great Project Management is also an indicator of great political alertness. Sometimes politics is about buying time. Can the project manager find ways of buying time while comforting the needs of the stakeholder? Yet there are also moments when a Project Manager should bite the pin and forego the interests of one of the stakeholders. Again, you may never read this in a PMBOK.
Again, although the Project Governance will outline many elements and processes, it will always be silent about the political realities that surround every project. A Project manager must thus be a fusion of both the technical and the political. If a Project Manager skews far on any end, it’s disastrous. A project manager must seek harmony of these elements.