Planning Stakeholder Engagement: Different People Need Different Strategies
An engagement plan carrying twenty-eight names with the same three phrases against each of them, engage regularly, communicate openly, manage expectations, is a plan that has decided nothing. The names came out of sound identification work and the analysis behind them may be perfectly good. Then the strategy column defeated everybody and got filled in generically at half past four on a Friday.
Strategy here is a per-person decision, and it turns on two questions. Where does this person sit in relation to the project now, and where do they have to be for the project to work? Most of the value is in the second question, because the honest answer for a lot of stakeholders is not very far from where they already are.
Where they are, and where they need to be
Describing somebody's current position is straightforward once you stop grading people. They may not know the project exists. They may know and be opposed. They may know and not care, which is the most common position of all and the least often written down. They may be supportive when asked. A few will be actively pushing the thing along.
The second question is where the discipline lives. A project needs a small number of people actively pushing, normally the sponsor and one or two others. It needs the people whose decisions it depends on to be at least willing. For everybody else, unobstructive is a perfectly respectable target, and a project that sets out to make forty people enthusiastic will spend a year of engagement effort on an outcome nobody needed.
Section 2.5.2 of the PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition includes Plan Stakeholder Engagement among the stakeholder processes, and the planning it asks for is particular to each relationship: what approach suits this person, given who they are and what the project needs from them. The distance between where somebody is and where they need to be is what an approach is for. Where there is no distance, there is nothing to plan.
The approach depends on why they are where they are
A position looks identical from the outside whatever produced it, and what produced it decides what will shift it. Simple ignorance is the easy case: somebody who does not know about the project needs telling once, properly, by a person whose call they will take, and that hour of work routinely gets inflated into a six-month communications stream. The harder positions have three common causes.
Cost to them is the most frequent cause of resistance and the least often named out loud. A manager opposing a system change may be opposing the two people it will take out of her team for eleven weeks. That is not an attitude problem, and no amount of explaining the benefits touches it. What works is finding out what the cost actually is and then removing it, compensating it, or acknowledging it honestly and asking for the help anyway.
History is the second. People who have lived through a badly handled change carry an entirely reasonable expectation that this one will go the same way. The approach here has to be evidential. Do one small thing you said you would do, on the date you said it, and let that stand as the argument. Very little else shifts a position built on experience.
Competing demand is the third, and it covers most of the people a plan records as neutral. They are not against the project. They have eleven other things and this is not in their top five. The approach is to keep the ask small, specific and timed, and to accept that their attention will arrive in short bursts. Asking for a monthly hour from somebody who has not got a monthly hour produces a diarised absence.
One boundary, four neighbours
A contractor was building fifty-two apartments on a town-centre site with a primary school on one side, a parade of shops on another, and a residents' association covering the streets behind. The engagement plan written at mobilisation gave all of them a monthly newsletter and a quarterly drop-in session.
By month three, three of those four relationships were in difficulty and the fourth had never been in doubt. The school needed something a newsletter could not carry: a schedule of noisy works mapped against their exam and assembly timetable, agreed a term ahead. The shops needed a weekly conversation about deliveries and footfall, because their problem changed every week. The residents' association needed a named person whose phone was answered, having spent two months routed to a site office number that went unanswered after four o'clock. The planning authority needed formal written submissions on a statutory timetable, and was entirely content.
The revised plan carried four different approaches and took less effort in total than the original. The school got one meeting a term with the site manager and a marked-up programme. The shops got a ten-minute call every Monday from the same person. The residents' association got a mobile number and a fortnightly email from the site manager rather than the client's communications team. The newsletter was dropped, since nobody had been reading it, and the quarterly drop-in stayed for the wider street.
The interesting part is the target set for each. The school needed to be able to plan around the works, and no more than that. The shops needed to be unobstructive, which is exactly what the Monday call bought. The residents' association was the only group that needed to become supportive, because they were the only one with standing to object at a later stage. Making all four supportive would have cost four times the effort and failed with at least two of them.
For a PMP® candidate, the first thing to work out is what position a situation actually needs somebody to reach, before deciding what to do about them. A stakeholder described as resistant does not automatically need converting; often they need a cost removed or an honest acknowledgement, and sometimes the project needs nothing more than for them to stop blocking. A fitting response names the target position and the cause of the current one. A structured PMP exam preparation course gives you short descriptions to practise reading both out of.
Take the engagement plan and add one column: what this person has to be able to do for the project to work. Most rows will come out as something like approve the design change in October, release two testers in March, or not object at the planning stage. Rows where the honest answer is nothing come off the plan, and the effort they were quietly absorbing goes to the four or five rows that carry the project.
Interested in going further?
Deciding how much engagement somebody actually needs is harder than deciding to engage everybody, and it is where most of the saved effort turns out to be. Omega's PMP® Exam Preparation works through situations where the right approach depends on why a stakeholder holds the position they hold.
Planning engagement stakeholder by stakeholder is described alongside the rest of the practice in the PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition.
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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
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