As pm, you’ll encounter many different kinds of difficult people.  In this post I’ll focus on the person who is too busy and too important to do any real work on the project, but is very keen to critique the work of others.  There are two ways of looking at a person like this: 1) the person is dead weight on the project, dragging the team down with their criticisms 2) the person is providing a valuable project assurance service.  How you respond to that person will depend upon where they sit on your stakeholder matrix – how senior and influential are they within the organisation?  How interested are they in the project? How much damage could they do if you fall out with them?

Its never beneficial to make enemies within an organisation, so I’d recommend trying to view the person’s contribution in a positive light, especially if they are senior and influential!