Identify Stakeholders: Who Needs Attention Before the Project Starts?
In the weeks before mobilisation there is nothing to report, which is precisely why communications planning gets postponed until there is. By the time it happens, the first impressions have already formed, usually shaped by whoever happened to speak to each person first, and the project's opening position with several important people has been set by accident.
Planning communications around stakeholder needs means working out, person by person, what each of them has to be able to do and what they need in order to do it. That produces a different document from one built by asking what the project will publish. It produces a short list of people who need attention now, a longer list who need something specific at a particular moment, and a general audience who will receive a report and skim it.
Who needs attention before there is anything to show
Three groups earn time before the project formally starts.
The first holds a decision the start depends on. A funding release, a resource commitment from a line manager, a data-sharing agreement, a permit, a security assessment, a slot in somebody else's change calendar. These people need approaching early because their process has a duration and the project's start date is sitting on top of it. A security assessment with a six-week queue is a communications matter in week one and a schedule problem in week seven.
The second group are the people whose view of the project will set within a fortnight and prove expensive to shift afterwards. Operational managers whose teams will be affected are the standard case. What they hear first, and who they hear it from, largely settles whether they treat the project as something happening to them or something they have a hand in, and that disposition tends to hold for the whole delivery.
The third group will hear about the project from somebody else if nobody tells them. Adjacent project managers, a regional director whose site turns up in phase two, a union representative, a supplier whose contract the work touches. Finding out second-hand is a small slight that generates a disproportionate amount of friction, and one phone call prevents it.
Four decisions for each person who matters
Section 2.5.2 of the PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition places Plan Communications Management among the stakeholder processes, and the planning it points at is particular to each relationship, not a timetable of publications. For the people who matter, four things are worth settling deliberately.
What you want them to do comes first. Approve something, release somebody, stop doing something, raise a concern early, defend the project in a meeting you will not be sitting in. A communication with no intended action behind it is a newsletter, and newsletters are perfectly fine as long as nobody mistakes them for engagement.
What they need in order to do it comes second, and this is the translation step most plans skip. An operations manager deciding whether to release two people needs to know what those two will be doing, for how long, and what happens to the day job while they are gone. A progress percentage is no help to her at all. The same underlying information has to be rewritten for every audience that will act on it, and rewriting takes time that somebody has to be given.
Third is who says it. A message from a peer lands differently from the same message sent by a project manager two grades below the recipient. Asking a sponsor to make three calls in the first fortnight is often the highest-return line in a communications plan, and it is usually the line nobody writes.
Fourth is tempo, which should follow how fast the stakeholder's own world moves. A regulator working to an annual cycle needs contact at their pace. A trading operations head whose priorities turn over weekly needs something short and frequent, and a monthly pack reaches her as archaeology. Setting everybody to monthly because the steering group meets monthly is the commonest way a communications plan becomes decorative.
One thing sits behind all four: every route needs a way back. A plan with no return path is a broadcast schedule, and the useful traffic is what comes the other way, since that is normally where you first learn something is wrong.
The six-week queue
A retail bank was preparing a programme to replace the fraud case management system used by around two hundred operations staff. Mobilisation was set for early September, with the first workshops in the second week.
Two conversations in July changed the shape of the whole programme. The first was with information security, who confirmed that the vendor assessment for a system touching customer data ran to about six weeks and could not begin until a completed vendor questionnaire existed. Nobody on the programme had known that, and the questionnaire took ten days to produce. Starting it in July rather than at mobilisation is what kept the September date.
The second was with the two operations team leaders whose staff would be in the workshops. They had been through a system replacement four years earlier in which they were told by email a week before training started, and they were expecting a repeat. Forty minutes each in July, before a single artefact existed, produced two people who spent the autumn explaining the programme to their own teams. The programme lead did not have to do it, and coming from them it was believed, which it would not have been coming from her.
Neither conversation appeared in the communications plan, which was written in September and described a monthly bulletin and a fortnightly steering pack.
For a PMP® candidate, the useful reading is that a communications question is usually a decision question underneath. A situation where stakeholders are reported as uninformed despite a full distribution list is asking what each of them needed in order to act, and a response that fits will name a person, a decision and a time. Look past the channel and the frequency to the action the communication is supposed to enable. Situations where the plan exists and achieves nothing are where that reading gets sharpened, and a structured PMP exam preparation course keeps supplying them.
Start by reading the existing communications plan looking for verbs. If every line says inform, update or share, what you have is a publication schedule. Take the six stakeholders who can most affect the outcome and write down, for each, the one thing you want them to do and the one thing they need in order to do it. Most of the six will turn out to need something the plan does not send them, and two of them will need it from somebody other than you.
Interested in going further?
The communications that decide a project's start date are usually the ones that happen before there is a plan to write them into. Omega's PMP® Exam Preparation works through situations where the decision setting the timetable sits outside the project altogether.
Plan Communications Management and the stakeholder processes around it are set out in the PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition.
Ad · Amazon affiliate link.
References
A132: The PMBOK 8 Stakeholders Performance Domain: What It Really Covers
A133: Stakeholder Management vs Stakeholder Engagement
A134: Power/Interest Grid vs Salience Model
A135: Stakeholder Power Is Not the Same as Engagement
A136: Why Hostile Stakeholders Still Need Engagement
PMP and PMBOK are registered marks of the Project Management Institute, Inc.
