The format of this course is mainly presenting interviews.

The topics concentrate on general project management and Agile approach.

For example, in one of the videos, we explained project stakeholders as follows:

GT: Hi all, this is our second video in our Project Management channel.

Yes, Mr. Izgi, today, we’ll talk about a very important subject in this video: Project Stakeholders. First, how can we define the Stakeholder in project management context?

Cİ: As far as a rigorous definition is concerned, a stakeholder is someone who can affect the project or who can be affected by the project. With this point of view, the upper management people are stakeholders, but also the project team members, subcontractors, customers, and the project manager. On the other hand, in many companies and at many references found in literature, the word stakeholder is tied with the upper management people in the company. Even the people who know this rigorous definition very well, might use the word stakeholder to mean more or less the upper management people only.

GT: Is it possible that a stakeholder would be resistant to the project, which would make the life of the project manager and team difficult?

Cİ: Yes, of course. Unfortunately it is very common. As a project manager, you might have to deal with a person who doesn’t want the project’s success. Moreover, very often these resistant people are more powerful than the project manager.

GT: Let me give some information about our future videos: We are going to cover how to engage stakeholders in a positive manner in different videos.

Cİ: Yes Mr. Tekir. The following question comes to mind: What are the responsibilities of a project manager related to stakeholders? First, the project manager should identify them correctly, as early as possible. Then, he or she should make plans about engaging them. Later, the stakeholder must be managed and monitored closely. It is generally believed that the most important factor related to a project’s success is the stakeholder support, especially support by upper management people. So, very often, when a project was successful, then the upper management people had good support. The opposite is also true.

GT: What should the project manager do if the expectations of the stakeholders conflict? For example, the customer wants to receive the product within a short timeline, but the upper management wants to lower the total cost of the project.

CI: Yea. This is seen very often. They may have competing priorities. It may be difficult to negotiate a consensus, especially early in the project. The project manager should try to balance the competing expectations and give details about the schedule and budget forecasts whenever possible. The scope might have to be negotiated, too.

GT: Mr. Izgi, I’d like to share my own experience in a consultancy project. The project was unsuccessful. The upper management wanted to start this project again but using lessons learned from the previous project. We started analyzing the previous project with the project manager, project management office members and sponsor.

We recognized that at the beginning of the project, there were 12 stakeholders, when they came in the middle of the project there were 63 people, and close to the end there were 24 people. The number of stakeholders fluctuated throughout the project. The project manager developed a stakeholder engagement plan at the beginning of the project but she did not continue to update the engagement plan. This caused communication mistakes. And, in the new project, I suggested making the stakeholder analysis and engagement plan to develop effective communication in the project continuously.

CI: Yes. This is very common. The stakeholders change throughout the project. So, the plans related to them must be updated regularly. Actually, not only plans related to the stakeholder, but other plans must be updated regularly, too. This is called progressive elaboration.

GT: We’ll talk more details about Progressive Elaboration in the future videos.

CI: Yes, in addition to this we’ll also talk about the stakeholder engagement plan and communications management plan in future videos.

GT: Mr. Izgi, for more than a year, most of us have been managing projects from our homes, virtually. Working with virtual teams has become a standard way of performing the job. Within this context, can you tell us how the projects with virtual teams should be managed?

CI: Sure Mr. Tekir. First, the project manager should try to create an environment which takes advantage of this diversity of location. Of course the diversity can also include cultural backgrounds, industry experiences, or even different languages. The project manager should try to build a team climate of mutual trust. There are many cases where the project team has to adopt a common project "team language" which is different from their mother tongue.

GT: Can you give some examples of the development objectives that the project manager might consider?

CI: It can include improving team knowledge and skills. We expect this would affect the cost, time and quality in a positive way. Trying to improve the trust would be another objective, which will raise the team morale, reduce conflict, and so, it will improve teamwork. Also, we need to keep in mind that a collaborative culture should be created. This will improve the performance. It will facilitate training and mentoring activities. Last, the team members should be empowered so that they participate in decision making and generating solutions. Related to this, it is frequently advisable to generate self managing teams at the projects, which is a topic we cover in a future video.

GT: We finished the topic of “Project Stakeholder” in this video. In the next video, we’ll talk about the skills needed, especially for a project manager and also including the team.

Cİ: In addition, we also cover all these subjects in our Project Management and PMP exam preparation courses. The people from our audience can send us an email message if detailed information is needed.

GT: Our email address is given on the screen as a subtitle.

Hope to see you in the next video. Bye.

Cİ: See you later.