Stakeholder interaction is an oft underappreciated aspect of successful project management that must be actively addressed if a project is to achieve its full potential. As (soon to be) RESS graduates, you are expected to be able to conceive and develop technically outstanding projects, but you must also be able to develop projects that succeed within their governmental, social, and cultural context. Stakeholder interaction is a key component to making that happen.
The purpose of working through the following Lynda.com lessons is to remind you how project managers works with potential and enrolled stakeholders. These tutorials are geared more towards how businesses and enterprise in general comprehend stakeholder relationships. What these video tutorials do not address is how we must further push our thinking about stakeholder engagement as a fundamental aspect of sustainability and sustainable systems. You have encountered issues concerning sustainability and stakeholders in numerous RESS courses and their lessons (from BIOET 533, EME 504, EME 805, EME 803, and others), and you are expected to approach stakeholder engagement aligned with those broader perspectives.
Why Work With Stakeholders?
This is a fair question. If people are not actually doing the work, why should they be involved? Here are a few good reasons; perhaps you can think of others as well:
- Stakeholder involvement may be required. Bosses and investors are especially desirous of appropriate updates and interactions relating to a project.
- Stakeholders can provide you with access to data and resources that would not normally be available.
- Stakeholders can support your project financially or otherwise. While financial support is obviously critical, non-monetary community support can also be very important, since the opposite (community opposition) can be detrimental to the project, especially if opposition is based on misunderstanding of the project.
- Stakeholders can ensure long term project success. Often, your role in project development will only be a small piece of the total success of the project, and often stakeholders for your project will be the active participants in complementary activities that will be critical to long term success. Consider, for example, the development of “E85 Flex-Fuel” vehicles in the United States. Without the support of ethanol producers, distributors, and retailers, the development of Flex Fuel vehicles will not be successful, even though those entities are not directly involved in designing or manufacturing the vehicles.
Building sustainable cities - and a sustainable future - will need open dialogue among all branches of national, regional and local government. And it will need the engagement of all stakeholders - including the private sector and civil society, and especially the poor and marginalized.
~ Ban Ki Moon, UN Secretary-General
How to Effectively Work With Stakeholders
The key to effective stakeholder engagement is creation and implementation of a Stakeholder Interaction Plan. While some people and groups carry out stakeholder interaction plans on an informal basis, it is best to explicitly create a written plan to that can be reviewed and revised, thus ensuring that key groups or activities are not excluded. Every stakeholder interaction plan should include, at a minimum, the following elements:
- List of Stakeholders - list, characterize, and prioritize the stakeholders for your project.
- Objectives - describe exactly what you hope to accomplish with stakeholder interaction (try to be specific-use measurable goals if possible). Consider not only what you hope to gain from the interaction, but also what the stakeholders hope to gain.
- Methods - describe how you plan to communicate with and engage your stakeholders, and when this will occur, relative to the overall project schedule.
- Feedback - Explain how you will receive feedback from stakeholders, how you will incorporate their feedback into the project, and how you will assess whether or not your objectives have been met.