Project Stakeholder Management

The Annual Symposium of the Project Management Institute (PMI®) Singapore Chapter was held at Suntec International Convention & Exhibition Centre on 22 November 2007 and was a great success, with over 230 project managers and project team members attending.

Here is a summary showing how many of the speakers covered elements of Project Stakeholder Management in their presentations:

Keynote speaker Foong Sew Bun of IBM (“Project Management 2.0“) mentioned that management involved ‘people skills’ and a knowledge of social science.

Scott Celley of Merrill Lynch (”Career progression, project, program and general management“) pointed out the value of communications and reporting among project stakeholders, and that ‘great Project Managers manage risk and stakeholder communications and politics, whilst always acting ethically’.

Mohan Krishnan of HP (”PM - key to implementation success“) noted that Project Management was the key to implementation success, and that we needed to achieve results through people and improve customer satisfaction.

Other speakers included:

KC Chan (”The 21st Century holistic PM“) - Building blocks of training and people

Lakshika Hettiarachchi (”PM’s - strong candidates for leadership?“) - Manager vs Leader, Personality Profiling, Stakeholder identification and communication being critical success factors in any project.

Chen Bin (”Leading complex virtual project teams“) - reminded us of the need to manage time-differences, and that we must sharpen our interpersonal skills.

Henry Lie (”Don’t just be a PM, be a leader“) - looked at the Lewis model and people skills.

Lalit Mohan (”Project execution practice“) - examined the project team organisation, managing the influence and interests of stakeholders and clients, and communications.

Anand Rao (”Global macro-management, local micro-management“) - showed a definition of stakeholders in a global program, and conflicts & resolution.

Roque Peralta (”Implementing project office for corporate governance“) - provided a methodology for managing project stakeholders, including meetings and explanations, and client management.

Suhwe Lee (”Transformation of personal leadership in global PM“) - mentioned that strong leadership is an asset when running global projects.

William Loh (”NLB’s project-centric approach in managing excellence“) - pointed out his experience of cross-functional project teams and collaboration.

Peter Gilliland of our very own ProjectStakeholder.com (”What you NEED to know about Project Stakeholder Management“) - presented the simple 6-step ‘ice-cube’ process for effectively managing the expectations of project stakeholders, with the closing phrase that “Good PM’s use stakeholder management to to gain support from others, ensuring their projects succeed where others fail”.

We look forward to the 2008 Annual Symposium.