Streamline Your Stakeholder Engagement Plan
Less time, more impact
Put on your marketing hats, because we are going to talk about stakeholder engagement.
I’m not in marketing, you say? Oh, but you are.
Elsewhere in business, we also refer to this work as communications, public relations, community building, branding, customer relations, or even sales. It is the branch in our worktree that focuses on building and maintaining support for our program. Program management professionals, in fact, are in the business of marketing.
But time spent on creating PowerPoint presentations is time not taken on the next component of your program. And it’s so easy not to write that next email…
How do we strike a balance between discussing our work and actually completing it?
How important is stakeholder engagement really?
For non-profit programs, stakeholders present one of the most significant boons or busts for the continuation of a program, particularly a long-running one. The ultimate goal of stakeholder engagement is to ensure that when your executive leadership is making a critical decision about your program – from expanding budget to saving your staff from layoffs to considering your next promotion - they accurately understand your program’s goals, benefits, progress, and reputation. If there’s a gap or, worse yet, a negative perception floating around, your program is vulnerable to being trimmed or terminated. In a sniff test, stakeholder engagement is vital.
That opinion is shared by the Project Management Institute (PMI) (i.e., the organization that sets the global standard for best practices), with stakeholders receiving top billing across PMI’s literature. Stakeholders appear as the top principal (i.e., program management value) and the third of six performance domains (i.e., program management activities) in the Standard for Program Management (SPM) (1).
Stakeholders are essential, but how do you determine the appropriate amount of time and effort to dedicate to stakeholder engagement? First, consider your program’s structure.
Money talks
A critical factor in considering effort expenditure on stakeholder engagement is whether your program is directly revenue-generating or not. Suppose your program offers a service and/or product that generates revenue (and, even better, turns a profit). In that case, your leadership has a straightforward way to assess your value, even without additional information. There remains a need to engage stakeholders, but a positive net balance is worth its weight in gold towards ensuring continued support. You do have more freedom to focus on development and implementation because the money is talking for you.
If you are a backline program working to improve operations, stakeholder engagement is going to be mission-critical. Your program is solely an expenditure, and its fate – particularly during a budget deficit – is based on a weighted aggregation of views from your stakeholders. You need the final decision makers to accurately understand a wide range of factors (goals, benefits, progress) as well as have a favorable perception of yourself and your staff. That’s a large amount of dynamic information to relay to people who are time- and attention-limited. To ensure your value is appropriately understood in “the room where it happens,” you need to mindfully and consistently practice stakeholder engagement.
PMI’s best practices for stakeholder engagement
The Project Management Institute outlines a highly structured process for stakeholder engagement in “The Standard for Program Management.” In short, there are five key steps: 1. Identification, 2. Analysis, 3. Engagement Planning, 4. Engagement, and 5. Communications. These steps then result in the production of five different documents: Stakeholder Register, Power/Interest Grid, Stakeholder Map, Engagement Plan with engagement measures, and a Communications Log (1 p.97 - 108).
As your program’s community is constantly changing, all these steps and documents are dynamic. That leaves you with a lot of documentation that continuously needs updating. That’s a lot of work. Perhaps too much?
Good intentions will lose to practicality
This moment is where the rubber meets the road, particularly for a low-resourced non-profit program. Suppose stakeholder engagement is mission-critical for your program’s success, and you follow recommended best practices. In that case, you've got a full-time job on your hands keeping all your logs, measures, and communications up to date. In the most ideal circumstances, you can dedicate a substantial portion of your time to this work. For many non-profit programs, though, you’re also covering project management and Program Management Office (PgMO) responsibilities, and you have little capacity to focus on such a wide breadth of engagement and communication activities.
It will become all too easy to let stakeholder communication slip when you're up against urgent deadlines and fixing immediate problems. How do you create a structured approach to stakeholder engagement without becoming overwhelmed by the work?
Top tips for balancing stakeholder engagement
At this point, I’ve hopefully convinced you of the importance of a structured approach to stakeholder engagement, but equally made it sound like the “Fountain of Youth,” highly desired, but not realistic. For the savvy program management professional, balance will come in a continuous train of difficult decisions, learning to say “no” more than “yes”. Through careful curation, you can come up with a plan that is achievable and ready for the long term.
Top tips for balancing stakeholder engagement:
Conduct a full-scale review at least once: If you are at the start of a program or stepping into the program management role on an ongoing program, carve out the time to do the Identification, Analysis, and Engagement Planning steps as recommended in the SPM. It’s a great way to get grounded in your community and its needs.
Make a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) engagement and communication plan: At step three, “Engagement Planning,” focus on making the lowest time, highest value plan possible. Don’t reach for the optimal. Stay practical and start small.
Use your instincts for the everyday: These documents and plans are not there to micro-manage your day-to-day activities. Remember to rely on your judgment and instincts for handling bumps in the road with stakeholders. It’s more valuable to debrief a negative interaction with your program team and jointly problem-solve than to update a log. Be confident that you can navigate interpersonal interactions without relying on an Excel spreadsheet.
Block dedicated time for updating stakeholder engagement materials, but in wide intervals: The value of PMI’s structured stakeholder engagement process is that it allows you to see the entire landscape of stakeholder needs and make strategic decisions. Instead of trying to keep a stakeholder register up to date every week, revisit the whole domain every 3–6 months or at a phase change in your program’s lifespan. Large chunks of dedicated focus time will pay off far more than regular small intervals, where keeping the documents updated becomes a chore.
Add more ambitious engagements over time: As you use your MVP stakeholder engagement plan, two themes will emerge. First, opportunities will come up organically for stakeholder engagement that you can’t pass up. A leader will invite you to present at the next staff meeting. A publication will reach out for an article. You need to be mindful about what you say “yes” to, but be open to serendipity. Second, you’ll get better at managing your program, which should free more time for extras such as communications. Two years down the road, you’ll be ready to start that bimonthly newsletter, and your top stakeholders will be eager for it.
Look for marketing help from marketing people: Remember that stakeholder engagement is marketing. If your organization is large enough, it will have a marketing or communications division. Use that resource if at all possible. If your program’s small, ask around for mentorship from an expert in social media. If your program involves a large number of external stakeholders, leverage marketing staff to create effective materials for you.
Use your computer (#AI)! Lastly, but not least, artificial intelligence (AI) and ever-more-sophisticated software tools are providing new ways to create high-quality content quickly. Over the past several years, I’ve developed the ability to create written content with custom images without the need for an editor, graphic artist, or other professionals. It’s been a game-changer. Keep your ear to the ground in professional forums for ways to speed up, improve quality, and leverage new media for communication.
“Come Together”
Honestly, in the real world, I have never seen a superior make a stakeholder engagement plan or manage a log in the way that PMI recommends. But I can equally attest that in the autopsy of my programs’ failures, it was a miss with stakeholder expectations that led to the collapse each time. The SPM offers a structured pathway for approaching stakeholder engagement that is highly promising towards proactively seeing the potholes and filling them in before problems escalate.
At the same time, I highly recommend keeping a light hand with it so you don’t get swamped in non-productive record keeping. Be strategic with your efforts, and you’ll secure higher-quality and quantity engagement-building opportunities than the traditionally “winging it” approach that has proliferated to date.
This week’s song pairing is “Come Together” sung by Gary Clark Jr., written by John Lennon—a high-energy cover of the original Beatles’ song. It’s a great mood builder about working with people. Enjoy.
References
Project Management Institute PMI. The Standard for Program Management - Fifth Edition. Project Management Institute; 2024.