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Over at Patrick Mayfield’s ever-useful Lessons Of A Learning Leader, he’s got some thoughts on winning over difficult stakeholders. His argument, and it’s one I agree with, is that one of the main competences of managing stakeholders is effective influencing and negotiation skills.

One of his steps is “Seek win-win or ‘no deal’” – finding out the stakeholder’s “what’s in it for me” position. That’s something that often gets overlooked – although it’s relatively easy to focus on their business objectives, there’s often another underlying dimension of personal goals which influences their approach to the negotiation.

This is particularly the case in change situations where the outcome is going to result in an alteration of their working practices – whether it’s a positive or negative change. There seems to an instinctive human reaction to seek out stability and routine, and one of the challenges of the project manager is to overcome that inertia. So an attempt to understand the personal motivations of a difficult stakeholder can sometimes provide the key to finding a way around their objections.

Patrick’s other point about negotiation is about being clear what your fallback position is – the BATNA, or Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement. While this is a vital thing to consider, I tend to think that this is a rather black-and-white approach. While it may be that there is a clear-cut win/lose situation, more often it’s painted in shades of grey. In this situation a useful mnemonic is BMW – or the Best, Medium, or Worst outcome you can hope for from a situation.

If negotiation is the process of exploring the optimum solution for all parties, then thinking in terms of a Medium – or compromise – solution is often helpful. It recognises the fact that both parties can get a positive result without necessarily having it all their way. And knowing what is your worst-case acceptable scenario (or BATNA) can help to crystalise whether this is an issue which is a vital showstopper that brooks no compromise, or perhaps a relatively unimportant negotiating point which can be sacrificed for gains elsewhere.

As I’m spending 5 hours on a train to and from London today, I figured I’d use the time productively and get some work done – not least catching up on a backlog of emails. I’d thought this was going to be made easier by using the on-board wifi service on the GNER trains between York and London – something that GNER are very proud of, and made much of during their franchise renewal exercise which recently concluded.

It’s presumably all part of their efforts to capture more high-margin business travelers who are willing to pay over the odds for flexible ticketing, station parking and other gizmos, as well as being able to use the traveling time productively. The idea presumably being that if you can get online with the onboard wifi, you can be cranking out those emails.

I can report that in practice, the service is a complete waste of time and money. To start with, the connection speed makes a 9.6kb dialup connection over GSM look like 100Mbs Ethernet. There’s supposedly a satellite connection on the roof of the train, backed up with multiple parallel GSM links – I suspect that reality is more like two tin cans and a very long piece of wet string. Pinging a range of servers such as Google was regularly resulting in 80% packet loss and 9,000 millisecond ping times.

Then halfway through the hour online that I bought, the wifi signal collapsed briefly. When it came back the DHCP server was unreachable, so my Powerbook spent the rest of the journey resolutely stuck with a 169.0.0.0 address.

So, GNER, you owe me the £4.95 I paid for an hour’s (alleged) internet access. If you’re planning to work on any of their Mallard services, I’d recommend you either download everything you need well before getting on the train, or alternatively take a thick paperback book instead. I eventually posted this with the aid of a (much, much faster) GRPS connection from a mobile, while stationary in a Starbucks.