How To Handle Difficult Stakeholders

I have had stakeholders that greatly disliked each other. Not polite to say, but it was a reality that I had to face. How do you handle that situation? I found it was rare that a stakeholder did not care about the job they did. More typically, each person is trying to do their job the way they think is best. The major personnel issues you run into are when these viewpoints conflict. I would always (subtly) press that the purpose of the work I was doing was to help the company and that I knew the stakeholder involved was trying to do that. If you kept working towards that, you could sometimes find the exact area of disagreement between the parties and either find a way to solve it or put off resolving it to a specific point in the future and get the rest of your work done. At one client, two user groups shared the value in a field and sometimes fought over what it should be. I gave them each their own field and, periodically, their managers would decide which value to use. They were very happy with that.