Southampton project management event a success 31-07-07
Dom Moorhouse was the keynote speaker at the recent Association for Project Management (APM) Wessex Branch's event on 'Beyond Conventional Stakeholder Management'.
Dom, the managing director of leading London programme management firm Moorhouse, told the audience how stakeholder management is a critical factor to a project's success, and engaging people at the right levels - before, during and after the programme delivery, was often the difference between failure and success.
Dom said: “The presentation focused on some key themes of successful stakeholder engagement – firstly, the importance of the political dimension as something that needs to be accepted and understood. Beyond this, programme leaders should know how to develop rapport, manage ideas, coordinate multi-faceted communication efforts and be able to objectively measure the stakeholder 'change journey.”
The event, that took place in Southampton, attracted over forty project managers from some of the South's leading companies such as Ministry of Defence, VT Shipbuilding and National Air Traffic Services, and was preceded by an informal supper and networking session.
Dom used a mix of best practice tools, approaches and real life case study examples gleaned from his twelve years of experience delivering successful programmes to demonstrate how project managers could align themselves with their stakeholders.
After his presentation Dom led a discussion around the importance of building a programme 'personality' from the offset, seeking to build a common team understanding of programme values and codes of conduct.
Delegates commented on the challenges they faced when doing this, particularly with international programmes where a wide variety of different cultures and behaviours existed.
Trevor Marshall, Project Manager at EDS, said: “The audience really enjoyed Dom's presentation, especially hearing about tried and tested techniques to help keep their programmes on track and their stakeholders fully on-board.”
