What do you do if stakeholders in your project have conflicting demands?

It entails determining their needs, collecting, evaluating, and documenting them, resolving any ambiguities, validating with stakeholders, and managing changes. This method ensures project outputs meet expectations and increase stakeholder satisfaction.

This is a key skill of the type of role such as a Business Analyst. Where there are conflicting stakeholder demands, it goes back to understanding what is the outcome trying to be achieved and what are the pros and cons of each need of the stakeholders. It's important to keep in mind that usually stakeholders have some form of emotional attachment to their needs, so it's about working with all stakeholders to come to an agreement on how best to achieve the needed outcome, more so than having stakeholders feel like their option 'lost' or was less important

Make a priority table, and use cases. When you can simplify the problem enough, they will be understand. The use cases will help to solve the conflicts, they can answer the question like this: "What the system do, when .... and .... this happen at the same time"

Security Requirements : Protecting user data is critical to maintaining trust and compliance. To ensure the app's integrity, security concerns must be addressed first. UI Enhancements (Product Owner): Improving the user interface leads to a better user experience, which is critical for app uptake and retention. This proposal is ranked after security since it directly affects customer pleasure. Customer Service Team: Adding in-app chat assistance can improve customer service, but it should be enabled after addressing security and UI issues. Social Media Integration: While integrating social media capabilities can improve marketing efforts, it is first viewed as a lower priority than security, user interface, and customer service.

Navigating conflicting demands from stakeholders requires adept communication skills, including the ability to tactfully decline requests when necessary. It's imperative to convey technical limitations and possible alternatives in a clear and transparent manner, devoid of confusing technical language. By ensuring stakeholders are fully informed about decision-making processes and the reasoning behind them, trust is fostered, enabling consensus-building and driving project progress.

If there are conflicting ‘needs’, it is imperative for all the involved project stakeholders to collaborate and analyse if there are business critical needs for any one or more business entities, which might come with a cost for other entities involved. If so, all the stakeholders should do a cost-benefit analysis to see if the ‘conflicting’ needs could be accommodated in the project plan/budget. If there are conflicting ‘demands’, then very senior project stakeholders should communicate to the demand-setters that it’s not practically/professionally feasible to accommodate all demands, as doing so could adversely impact other business entities. Prioritisation can be suggested thereafter.

Prioritize key objectives, seek compromise where possible, involve them in the decision-making process, and work towards a solution that aligns with the project's overall goals and objectives.