Your SAP Stakeholders Aren’t Being “Difficult"

Rethinking the Problem of ‘Difficult Stakeholders’

One of the most common frustrations SAP consultants face is dealing with stakeholders who appear resistant, unresponsive, or indecisive.

A business lead who pushes back on design proposals is described as obstructive. A sponsor who delegates everything is called disengaged. A subject matter expert who raises doubts late in the project is labeled as disruptive.

It’s tempting to treat these behaviours almost as social incompetence. They didn’t “get the memo”, or they’re not a “team player". But doing so cuts short the conversation before the most important questions get asked: what are they actually trying to communicate, and what are we missing?

Stakeholders who act in puzzling or unhelpful ways are often misunderstood, not malicious. More often than not, the discomfort consultants feel when engaging with these individuals is a sign that their perspectives are not being interpreted properly.

This article from IgniteSAP asks if conflict isn’t just about scope or timelines, but about the failure to fully grasp what matters to the people involved.

Who Are The Stakeholders,  And What is at Stake?

While most consultants understand stakeholder management as a necessary part of project delivery, the working assumption tends to be that stakeholders occupy defined roles and only think in those terms: business owners, end users, sponsors, architects.

In practice, stakeholders are not just defined by their roles. And understanding stakeholders involves paying attention to what people say, what they avoid saying, how they behave under pressure, and where their authority comes from.

Consultants often assume that visible participation equates to influence, but informal networks can be far more decisive in SAP projects than formal ones as people are more free to communicate and form alliances outside of the formal structure.

A delivery lead might rely heavily on a junior user who knows the legacy quirks that aren’t documented anywhere. An executive sponsor might defer entirely to a trusted deputy who isn't even listed on the governance structure. Missing these dynamics can lead to misunderstandings that can profoundly affect the progress of a project.

The Consultant as Interpreter

Delivery teams often focus too much on what they are building, and not enough on who they are building it for.

This happens partly because consultants are trained to think in terms of deliverables: blueprints, test plans, and cutover schedules. But when projects stumble, it’s sometimes because someone important felt unheard, misunderstood, or misrepresented. And by the time that becomes visible, relationships have already suffered: with a corresponding fragmentation of communication and collaboration.

Interpreting stakeholders well means asking not only what they want but why they want it, how they expect to achieve it, and what trade-offs they are willing to make. It means recognising when a stakeholder’s objections are not objections at all, but signals that something more important is being left unsaid.

The best consultants develop an additional capability: in understanding the needs and relationships organisations they are working with. They read the tone of stakeholder feedback. They observe what people avoid discussing. They notice when a decision is being made by someone not in the room.

These informal observations help consultants steer conversations in ways that can reveal hidden priorities and reduce misunderstandings.

Understanding Without Overstepping

There is a delicate line between reading stakeholders well and presuming to speak for them. 

Consultants can fall into the trap of thinking they know what stakeholders mean without checking. A consultant who thinks they’ve "read between the lines" may bypass conversations that could have revealed far more, or worse, alienate the very people whose trust the project depends on.

The remedy is to use intuition and interpretation as a starting point for dialogue. Instead of saying “we understood your requirement,” the more productive approach is: “this is what we took from the discussion, have we missed anything?”

In projects where this kind of communication becomes standard, something important begins to happen. Stakeholders start offering more context. They explain the internal pressures they face. They give earlier warnings about concerns. They become less guarded and more candid.

Conditions That Shape Stakeholder Behaviour

Misunderstandings often arise from conditions that make it harder for stakeholders to express themselves clearly. Some of these conditions are structural, like time pressure, organisational silos, or unclear governance. Others are psychological: fear of reputational risk, fatigue from change, or cynicism from past projects.

When stakeholders appear uncooperative, it is worth considering what environment they are reacting to. For instance, if a team has been through three failed rollouts in five years, they may approach even a well-run SAP implementation with hesitation. That hesitancy can look like resistance, but it is actually a request for reassurance that their concerns won’t be ignored again.

Consultants who understand this don’t try to push past the hesitation. They create space to acknowledge it. That might mean adjusting workshop pacing, revisiting prior change impacts, or involving others who can validate the process from the inside.

Sometimes, the most useful step is simply giving someone the opportunity to explain their concerns in their own words, without judgement or interruption.

Making Room for Meaningful Voices

When consultants rely only on the loudest or most senior contributors, they end up solving problems from a distance. The result is often a clean solution on paper that doesn’t quite survive first contact with real usage.

Involving less visible stakeholders requires understanding who holds practical knowledge, who others listen to, and whose day-to-day experience might reveal flaws in the assumptions baked into design choices.

The challenge for consultants is that these individuals don’t always volunteer their views unprompted. They may feel intimidated by senior forums or unsure whether their contribution will be valued. Consultants who take time to speak with them directly, in their own environment, can gain a much clearer picture of how the proposed changes will land once the system goes live.

The Role of Communication Patterns in Shaping Understanding

It is easier to focus on individual conversations or workshops, but much of what determines whether stakeholders feel understood takes place through broader communication habits.

These include how often people are updated, whether discussions are framed in terms that make sense to them, and whether feedback is treated as noise or as useful input. When communication defaults to status updates and compliance reminders, stakeholders tune out and become only passively involved.

When communication is bi-directional, frequent, and designed around genuine curiosity, consultants send a signal that the act of interpretation, and building understanding, is an ongoing collaborative process.

When feedback is invited and then visibly acted on, stakeholders know their experience matters. And when information is shared in formats that speak to different working styles, visual summaries for executives, scenario walk-throughs for users, technical diagrams for IT, people feel less like they are being asked to conform to a delivery process and more like they are “being consulted” for what they know.

This reduces the need for repeated rework and redesign, because misunderstandings are caught early, not buried until testing or deployment.

From Agreement to Commitment

When consultants focus only on surfacing requirements, they may achieve agreement without commitment. Stakeholders might sign off on documentation without truly buying into the direction of the project. They comply with the process, but they don’t contribute to its success.

This is particularly common in projects that feel imposed from above, or that don’t clearly connect to the daily concerns of those affected. What is needed is shared purpose. 

Shared purpose does not mean everyone wants the same thing. It means people understand what matters to each other and recognise that success will be broader, more stable, and more credible if all those concerns are reflected in how the project is run.

This requires a consistent, practical effort to draw connections between stakeholder needs and project actions. It also requires a bit of humility. Consultants are there to deliver a system, but the organisation has to live with it.

Understanding as Cultural Foundation

When consultants interpret stakeholders well, the organisation begins to build a habit of talking about what matters in ways that go deeper than checklists or status slides.

People start asking better questions in other projects. They become more comfortable raising early concerns. They notice when decisions are being made without full input and are more likely to speak up. In short, the ability to understand others becomes a shared competence, not just something expected from delivery teams.

This takes time, and it comes from repeated exposure to better ways of working.

When stakeholders experience what it’s like to be listened to properly, to have their views understood before they are challenged, and to feel that their concerns shape the course of the project, they begin to expect that standard elsewhere too. And when organisations start to behave this way across workstreams, they become more adaptive, more stable, and better equipped to manage change.

This also reduces the costs of future delivery. Projects are less likely to be derailed by surprise resistance. New systems are more likely to be used as intended. People are more likely to bring their best thinking to the table, because they don’t feel like they have to protect themselves from decisions that ignore their experience.

Consulting Means Listening

There is an ambiguity in our industry’s use of the word “consultant”. It is rooted in the Latin verb “consulere”, meaning “deliberate, take counsel, or ask advice”.

Many consultants assume that their role is to dispense advice and guide based on their expertise, but it is just as true to say the consultants deliberate on the best course of action, but according to the counsel or advice they have received on the various aspects of the business, from those stakeholders who have the most knowledge about those areas.

Consultants can then provide the right advice, and make the right decisions, based on that information. In short, “consulting” is interpretive, as well as decisive. 

Consultants who approach stakeholder engagement this way don’t avoid tough conversations, they have more constructive ones. They don’t paper over disagreement, they draw it out and work through it. They don’t assume they’ve understood, they keep checking, asking, and adjusting.

Understanding, in this context, is not a soft skill. It’s the groundwork for every durable success in an SAP project. It’s what turns delivery into partnership, and what turns a list of tasks into something closer to genuine collaboration.

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