Early warning system

Good communication with stakeholders ensures openness and timely identification of issues and risks, say Stephen Woodward and Patrick Watson.

Successful projects depend on teams anticipating issues and dealing with them quickly. Listening to wider stakeholder groups on all aspects of a project will generate a clear picture of the potential pressure points. There are many ways to engage with your various stakeholders and, no doubt, you will have your own preferred means of engagement.

Whatever means of engagement you use, it probably falls into one of three broad approaches:

• Dominant stakeholder-driven needs engagement that could be likened to broadcasting a message.
• Understanding the different objectives and needs of stakeholders to give a compromise model of engagement.
• Finding the underlying interests of stakeholders so that these can be understood and differences solved together as a reconciliation model of engagement.

Thus, we see that styles of stakeholder engagement vary considerably. At one end of the spectrum are those who favour engagement as one-way broadcasting where one stakeholder or group of stakeholders attempts to convince others of their point of view. Meanwhile, many favour a more collaborative, two-way flow of information where listening and getting feedback is just as important as broadcasting one’s own message. The latter seeks to identify, and, while not necessarily agreeing with, understand and acknowledge the needs of others to create consensus through genuine open and transparent dialogue. As with other aspects of project management, a process is a necessity to make it effective. In designing your process, it might be helpful to evaluate it against the following observations.

Understand their needs
Frequently, it appears that in the drive towards the all important end date, we might be good at broadcasting our own message about our projects and programmes, but we overlook the human dynamics of project teams and stakeholders. Perhaps broadcasting takes up too much of our bandwidth. Maybe we are not so good at listening. The result is we only find out too late in the implementation process what we did not know about our project or programme. Often project processes do not allow for empirically measuring and monitoring stakeholder engagement levels. There is a requirement to understand fully which stakeholder groups are engaged, which are not and why. If you do not effectively engage with your stakeholders, you have no certain way of understanding their needs and feelings about your project.

Increasingly competitive fee levels over the past few decades have put a strain on project resourcing. We have moved away from a typical project resource level where members of the project management team could spend time with stakeholders finding out the concerns and feelings of individuals about their project and feeding these back to those managing the project. It is therefore of paramount importance to have a process that takes the place of, and improves upon, this labour-intensive form of early warning.

Such a shift needs to acknowledge that stakeholder issues are far more than just management of outside concerns. Stakeholder mapping at the widest spectrum is necessary to identify those individuals who can affect your project. This, and subsequent engagement, are serious topics that merit a dialogue within the project management team. As with all project processes, planning before implementation is important. If good listening is integral to your stakeholder engagement, it is vital to talk to, and importantly, listen to the right stakeholder groups. Good stakeholder engagement requires that stakeholders are treated as individual people, rather than as corporate entities, and as individuals who have changing personal perceptions about their project. Underlying all this is the need for continuous feedback to understand whether you are communicating or not.

Rightly, there is a professional focus on continuing improvement. Is enough attention given to obtaining open and transparent feedback? If not, how do you improve delivery without the opportunity for gathering lessons learned in a way that improves feedback and allows safe and open stakeholder expression? Today’s environment requires a shift in the project mind-set and a realisation that stakeholder engagement is not just about public relations, but rather about getting better outcomes for all involved. Surely the issue is how do you improve engagement rather than how do you improve management? Just as with other project processes and controls, stakeholder engagement requires a systematic, mapped-out process that takes account of causes and effects – a process for encouraging project interaction that reaches out to all those who are affected by, and have an impact on, a project. Without a defined and demonstrable process, ineffective engagement with stakeholders is a major project risk in itself.

One of the chief distinguishing characteristics for a stakeholder engagement process is the requirement to get an accurate understanding of what the various stakeholder groups are saying and, at the same time, empower the stakeholder body through continuous feedback. To be truly effective, the means of eliciting information must allow stakeholders to be free to say what they want. Therefore, there needs to be the means of protecting anonymity in collecting otherwise unavailable confidential information about the project. It is essential to have independent empirical evidence of the level of stakeholder engagement to allow strategies to be developed and adjusted in order to measure how well stakeholder engagement is performing and give the opportunity to take early non-confrontational, corrective action as needed. If working well, a good process will improve communication across all stakeholder groups and create the openness and transparency to allow identification of emerging issues and risks.

Ultimately, best practice stakeholder engagement requires an efficient process that mirrors talking and listening to each stakeholder as an individual. Encouraging an open, collaborative environment, with two-way feedback, allows stakeholders to express their views and engage fully with the project. This also ensures that an early-warning system is in place to identify any emerging risks or conflicts, thus reducing the risk of problems developing in the teams delivering projects or contracts. So, it is clear that better stakeholder engagement will lead to better projects and outcomes for all.  

Stephen Woodward is a director at ResoLex, a specialist consultancy that supports projects with communication and stakeholder engagement to create project teams that build a consensus approach to project delivery

Patrick Watson is a founding partner at 3PM, a portfolio,programme and project management consultancy