When Stakeholders Disagree: What Should the PM Do First?

Two stakeholders have told you opposite things in the same week, and both of them have a defensible reason. One wants the parallel run extended. The other wants it removed. You are the person standing between them, you have a date to hold, and both are now waiting for you to say something.

The instinct is to settle it. Get them in a room together, broker a compromise, split the difference, or quietly go with whichever of the two carries more weight in the organisation. All four are available within the hour, all four feel like progress, and all four are usually premature.

The first move is not resolution. It is working out what each of them is actually protecting.

A stated position is not the same as a requirement

When a stakeholder tells you what they want, they are usually describing a solution they have already selected. "We need a full month of parallel running" is not a need. It is one person's chosen answer to a need they may not have set out, and in many cases have not consciously examined.

Behind the position sits something more durable: a constraint they cannot move, an obligation they have taken on elsewhere, an experience they are determined not to repeat, or a measure they are held to that you know nothing about. That deeper layer is where the disagreement can actually be worked on. Two incompatible positions frequently rest on two entirely compatible constraints, and there is no way to see that from inside the argument.

This is one reason the Stakeholders Performance Domain, Section 2.5 of the PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition, treats engagement as continuous relational work rather than a register you complete at the start and file. A stakeholder analysis carried out in week two is a hypothesis about what people care about. It is not a finding, and parts of it will have quietly gone out of date by the time positions harden.

Why the joint meeting is usually one step too early

Most project managers reach for the workshop first. It looks like decisive facilitation, it puts the problem in one place, and it can be arranged before lunch.

The difficulty is that people behave differently in front of each other. In a joint session, a stakeholder who has stated a position in an earlier email will defend that position rather than explain the constraint underneath it, because explaining the constraint in front of a peer sounds like conceding. A difference of view becomes a matter of standing, and standing is far harder to climb down from than an opinion. You can end up with two people more committed to their stated answers than they were before you intervened.

Separate conversations first cost you a day or two and buy you the actual shape of the problem. Three things are worth establishing in them.

The first is what each party is protecting, and whether it is a hard constraint, a commitment they have made to someone else, or a memory of something that went badly. These are not the same and they do not respond to the same treatment. A regulatory constraint is immovable. A commitment made to a director can often be renegotiated by the person who made it. A bad memory can sometimes be addressed by evidence, or by a control that makes the feared outcome recoverable.

The second is whether either position is really a decision that belongs to someone else. A surprising proportion of stakeholder disagreements are two people arguing about something that neither of them has the authority to decide, which is worth knowing before you spend a fortnight trying to reconcile them.

The third is what happens to each of them if the other one gets their way. Exposure is rarely symmetrical. One stakeholder may be facing an inconvenience and the other a genuine professional risk, and that asymmetry usually explains the intensity of a disagreement far better than the stated arguments do.

Only after those three are clear does a joint conversation become useful, because you are no longer facilitating a debate. You are putting two constraints on the table and asking what can be built that respects both.

A parallel run that neither side would move on

A programme replacing depot scheduling software across four sites reached a genuine impasse. The operations director insisted on a full month of parallel running. The finance sponsor refused outright, because the additional licence and staffing cost had not been budgeted and she had already given the board a figure for the year.

Read as positions, these are irreconcilable. One month against zero. The obvious move is to negotiate towards a fortnight, which would have satisfied nobody and protected nothing.

Separate conversations produced a different picture. The operations director had been through a cutover at a previous employer that lost three days of bookings, and what he was protecting was not the parallel run itself but the ability to recover if the new system dropped work silently. The finance sponsor was protecting a specific commitment made to a specific audience, and had no objection in principle to spending money on reducing risk provided it was visible and provided she was not surprised by it.

Once both constraints were on the table, the workable answer became fairly obvious, and it was not a compromise on duration. Parallel running was limited to the single highest-volume depot, for two weeks, with a tested rollback and a daily reconciliation of bookings across all four sites. The cost was a fraction of the original proposal, it was raised through the change process rather than absorbed, and it addressed the specific failure the operations director was worried about rather than the general category of failure. Neither stakeholder had proposed it, and neither would have arrived at it by meeting in the middle.

The mechanics of this shift with the delivery approach, although the underlying work does not. On a predictive project, disagreements of this kind tend to surface at defined points, at requirements agreement, at baseline approval or through change control, and the organisation usually has formal machinery for handling them. That machinery is genuinely useful, and treating it as bureaucracy is a mistake, but it can also disguise the fact that nobody has understood what either party is protecting. A signed decision reached without that understanding tends to come back.

In adaptive delivery the same disagreement surfaces continuously, through the backlog and through what gets pulled into the next iteration, and much of it is concentrated in a single prioritisation role. That is a structural answer to the problem rather than an absence of one. It does not remove the enquiry, it relocates it, and where a product owner lacks the standing to hold two senior stakeholders apart, the project manager is back in the same position with less formal support. Hybrid arrangements often produce the sharpest version of all, because the disagreement is frequently about which part of the work should sit under which regime.

When it is not yours to settle

Some disagreements are not resolvable at project-manager level, and recognising that early is a skill rather than an admission. If two stakeholders hold genuinely incompatible mandates, or if the decision requires authority you do not have, the correct action is to escalate.

What matters is what you escalate with. Handing a sponsor an unresolved argument invites them to pick a side, which frequently produces a fast decision that damages a relationship you will need for another eight months. Handing them two clearly stated constraints, the options that respect each one, the cost of each option and your recommendation lets them make the decision they are actually there to make. This is the kind of judgement we work through in detail during PMP® Exam Preparation, because knowing when to escalate is inseparable from knowing what an escalation should contain.

For a PMP candidate, the useful thing to notice is how much weight the current examination content outline places on this territory. The People domain accounts for 33 per cent of the exam, and stakeholder work is not a single task within it. Engaging stakeholders, aligning expectations and managing expectations are three separate tasks, alongside a further task on managing conflicts. That separation is a reasonable reflection of practice: identifying who matters, getting expectations into the same shape and holding them there over time are different activities requiring different behaviour.

PMP preparation can sometimes leave candidates with the impression that "meet with the stakeholders to understand their concerns" is a safe answer whenever a disagreement appears in a scenario. As a habit of mind it is sound, and it is certainly better than escalating immediately or picking the more senior stakeholder. What it does not do on its own is distinguish between a scenario where separate enquiry is needed, one where a joint session is now appropriate, and one where the project manager is being asked to settle something that is not theirs to settle. Recognising which of those three you are in is the actual competence.

On a real project, the payoff for getting this right is not a smoother meeting. It is the range of options you end up with. A project manager who understands what two people are protecting can usually find a course of action that neither of them proposed, that costs less than either original position, and that both are prepared to own afterwards. That third option almost never appears when you begin by trying to make the disagreement go away.

Andre Malowney

Interested in going further?

Stakeholder disagreement is one of the areas where the gap between knowing the theory and handling the situation is widest, because the pressure to act arrives before the information does. Our PMP® Exam Preparation course works through this kind of decision across the People domain, using scenarios where the sound first move is not the most obvious one.

The Stakeholders Performance Domain sets out the wider engagement picture that sits behind this single decision, and the PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition is where to read it in full.

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References

A132: The PMBOK 8 Stakeholders Performance Domain: What It Really Covers
A136: Why Hostile Stakeholders Still Need Engagement
A134: Power/Interest Grid vs Salience Model
A139: Communication Plans That People Actually Use
A133: Stakeholder Management vs Stakeholder Engagement

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