Building A Stakeholder Management Plan

Stakeholder management is a requirement in most projects (even though it is often overlooked) and a careful application of best practice can yield far more successful outcomes to projects.

Stakeholder management is being aware of all the parties that are affected by a project and making sure that communication with those parties is maintained throughout the duration of the project.

Identify Your Stakeholders

The initial stage of drafting a stakeholder management plan involves identifying who the various stakeholders are. Some will be perfectly obvious and may already have engaged with you, others might be harder to uncover and may require a careful approach from the outset.

For example, on something like a large engineering project that is going to impact on an area of a city, you might have a stakeholder list like this:

• The construction/engineering company undertaking the work

• Residents that may be affected

• Planning authority

• The wider general public who may be affected by transport disruption

• Local government bodies

• The Chamber of Commerce

• Environmental groups

• Service providers like water and electricity that may have their services impacted

Dealing with Stakeholders

All stakeholders can be grouped depending on their level of influence (high or low) and their level of interest (high or low). For example, you might have the planning authority as being of high influence and high interest, indicating that you will need to keep them satisfied. Local government might be of high influence but low interest indicating that you will want to keep them satisfied.

As you work down to the less influential stakeholders you might have environmental groups in the low influence, low-interest bracket that need to be simply monitored in case there is an environmental issue during the course of the project. A good example of low influence but high interest would be the affected residents and they should be kept informed by regular public consultation.

The Role of Voxcito

What is clear is that communication and engagement will be critical elements in any successful stakeholder management plan. Understanding these stakeholders and having them maintained in one database rather than scattered throughout your project management structure will be essential if you are to co-ordinate communication effectively. Tools like Voxcitio sit on top of a stakeholder management plan and allow project coordinators to maintain control of the process.

You will need:

• A way to segment stakeholders into your chosen categories like the one above. This can be done through stakeholder tagging.

• A way to map out the specific location of stakeholders for face-to-face engagement if necessary. This is particularly useful when doing public consultation work.

• Open communication channels to keep all stakeholders informed, eg email blasts, social media updates, press releases, public canvassing.

• A method of tracking specific issues, suggestions or requests that come in from stakeholders and a way to assign this casework to the relevant person on your project team.

• The ability to conduct surveys

• The organizational ability around your team members and what tasks they need to undertake to maintain stakeholder relationships.

Why not set up a call with the team at Voxcitio HQ and we can run through all our functionality with you?