Managing Stakeholders: Challenges in Complex Defence Projects

This report identifies five key challenges in managing stakeholders within complex defense projects: conflicting stakeholder interests, resistance to sharing data, mis-defining real needs, difficulties in accepting or rejecting stakeholder requirements, and the urge to design the key end system prematurely. To address these challenges, the report suggests strategies such as conducting thorough stakeholder analysis workshops, actively assessing requirements, documenting quality requirements, defining "as-is" and "to-be" models, and facilitating face-to-face meetings to foster mutual understanding and agreement. In cases where agreement cannot be reached, the report recommends involving a nominated decision-maker to resolve conflicting requirements and move the project forward.

Running head: INTEGRATED INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECT MANAGEMENT
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Challenges
Five challenges that can be faced during the process of managing stakeholders on the
complex defense projects
Stakeholder interests: every stakeholder group has their individual interest, considering
these the framework of the complex project is designed. After every project decision that is
taken, the stakeholder groups are approached to show their interests in it; in this case the main
challenge faced by the complex project is the varying interests of stakeholders, not all the
stakeholder group agrees to a specific decision that has been undertaken (Buede & Miller, 2016).
This as a result, creates issues in understanding the stakeholder expectations and roles whereas
these fields are very essential for a complex defense project to figure out in order to prevent the
failure of the project. Apart from these, the challenge faced during the process of stakeholder
analysis includes choosing the stakeholder whose interests and suggestions should be considered.
These challenge further results in conflict among the groups of stakeholders.
Stakeholder’s resistance to share data: this might result to be a major issue in the
process of stakeholder management while carrying out complex defense projects. In this case
analysts of the project would encounter the issue; the stakeholders might not seem to be
interested in sharing information. While carrying out a complex defense project, the main feature
that needs to be considered includes coordination from the side of stakeholders as well. In this
case their hesitation in sharing any sort of data in any field makes it a challenge for the entire
project (Dr. Edwards, 2014). This challenge further rises few more issues like resistance in
change among the stakeholders where they do not prefer to change the way they work even for
the betterment of the project.

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Mis-defining the real needs: one more challenge in the complex defense project include
mis-defining of the real needs of stakeholders. In case the requirements are not defined and
translated, any requirements that are poorly defined might lead to the failure of the project (Carl,
2015). Some scenarios where the stakeholders might mis-define requirements include the usage
of project for defining their wish list; this might result in missing several requirements or poorly
prioritized requirements.
Accepting or rejecting stakeholders: in case of complex defense projects, the main
challenge faced by the project includes the conflicting requirements. There are cases when
various conflicting requirements are received from different stakeholders, in this case the
challenges involved include which requirement is to be accepted and which should be rejected
(Project Management Institute, 2017). A decision needs to be taken where all the stakeholders
would agree on the needs that are to be delivered.
Urge to design the key end system: suppose a stakeholder is close to a specific process
that undergoes within the complex defense project, they usually identify the inefficiencies along
with creating workarounds to the issue. In this case suppose an analyst asks regarding the
requirements to the stakeholders, they would tell those regarding solutions instead of telling them
the actual requirements. In most of the cases, the solutions provided by them are perceived
problems and not the cause of the issue.
Strategies
The strategies that needs to be followed in order to address these challenges are as
follows
Stakeholder analysis: the business analyst of a complex defense project can initiate in
preparing a workshop with the help of a stakeholder analysis and hence communicate the entire

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plan of the workshop, outlining the main purpose of the workshop and figure out the expected
outcomes. Good strategies that can be used for implementing the workshop such as “POWER”.
The usual approach can be changed with the difficult stakeholders (Nielsen, et al., 2015). Their
trust can be gained by pointing out something that they have in common, show the project’s
value and then share their success stories from various previous projects.
The requirements must be actively accessed and ensured that the quality requirements
have been documented along with carrying out of proper stakeholder analysis. The “as-is” and
“to-be” models must be defined in order to understand the features that are to be delivered.
A face-to-face meeting can be arranged for the stakeholders in order to understand the
actual perspective that underpins every requirement (Buede & Miller, 2016). It would be helpful
in making the process more visual for transparency, apart from these the complex requirements
would be understood effectively. In this case the best result would be a mutual agreement on
how to move forward with the conflicting requirements. In case an agreement cannot be reached,
a nominated decision maker must be approached.

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References
Buede, D. M., & Miller, W. D. (2016). The engineering design of systems: models and methods.
John Wiley & Sons.
Carl D. Martland (2015) Towards more sustainable infrastructure: project evaluation for
planners and engineers. John Wiley & Sons.
Dr. Edwards. M. (2014). Support Systems: from Concepts to a Systems Engineering Model.
Engineering Fellow
Nielsen, C. B., Larsen, P. G., Fitzgerald, J., Woodcock, J., & Peleska, J. (2015). Systems of
systems engineering: basic concepts, model-based techniques, and research
directions. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 48(2), 18.
Project Management Institute. (2017). A guide to the project management body of knowledge
(PMBOK guide). Newtown Square, Pa: Project Management Institute.