Tailoring Stakeholder Engagement
Engagement usually gets rationed by accident. A project has a certain amount of attention to give, its stakeholders have a certain amount to give back, and most plans spread both evenly across everybody on the list. Even distribution is the one allocation guaranteed to be wrong, because the people on any stakeholder list differ enormously in what their attention is worth to the work.
Treating engagement as one of the things a project tailors makes this manageable. It has a cost, it has a proportion, and how much any one relationship gets is a tailoring decision like any other.
Engagement is a budget
Three costs are worth counting, because only the first of them usually gets noticed.
Your time is the obvious one. A fortnightly call with six people comes to around forty hours a year of a project manager's time before any preparation, and there are only so many of those available in a week.
Their time is the one projects spend freely, because it appears on nobody's budget. A quarterly session for thirty people is a hundred and twenty person-hours of an organisation's capacity, and most of the people in the room have jobs the session is keeping them from. Spending somebody else's attention carelessly has a second effect as well: it teaches them that your invitations can be declined.
The channel carries a cost of its own. A steering group of nine costs nine diaries, a secretariat, a pack and a month of lead time for anything that has to go to it. Creating a forum is a commitment to feed it, and a forum that meets with nothing to decide is worse than no forum at all.
Where to spend it
Section 3.3.3 of the PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition lists engagement among the things a project adjusts to its circumstances, and the adjustment turns on a single question. Would a change in this person's position change what happens to the project?
Somebody whose decision sits on the critical path, whose refusal would stop the work, or whose active help would remove weeks, is worth a great deal of attention, and that attention should be frequent, direct and personal. Somebody who is interested, affected and unable to move the outcome in either direction is worth informing properly and no more, and there is no disrespect in it.
The question is about consequence, not seniority, which is where most engagement plans come apart. A connections engineer at a network operator, three levels down and with no stake at all in your project's success, may hold the single date every other date is calculated backwards from. A director two levels above your sponsor may be genuinely interested and structurally irrelevant to the outcome. An allocation built on the organisation chart gets both of those backwards.
A useful sanity check is to total it up. Where the engagement plan implies more hours a week than the project manager has, it is not a plan, and the parts that quietly get dropped will be chosen by accident during a busy fortnight.
Saying the reduction out loud
Tailoring engagement downwards is legitimate, with one condition attached: the person has to be told.
An unstated reduction is indistinguishable from neglect. A stakeholder involved for the first three months who then hears nothing draws a conclusion, and the conclusion is usually about their own standing. The same person, told in month one that they will get a written update each quarter and a named contact for anything urgent, is being treated straightforwardly and generally accepts it, because most people have plenty to be getting on with.
The second discipline is to describe what they get rather than what they have lost. A quarterly update and a direct number is an offer. Being told you are no longer in the fortnightly group is a demotion, and it is the same arrangement described badly.
The date that everything hung from
A developer was building a solar site with a grid connection about four kilometres from the array. The stakeholder list ran to fourteen entries: the network operator, a parish council, three landowners, the farmer whose land the cable route crossed, a wildlife trust, the client's asset team, the planning authority and several more.
The engagement plan gave all fourteen the same thing, a monthly newsletter and an invitation to a quarterly meeting. It was even-handed and indefensible. Energisation depended on the network operator, whose connections engineer controlled the date every other date in the programme was calculated backwards from, and he was receiving a newsletter.
The reallocation took an afternoon. The connections engineer got a fortnightly twenty-minute call with the project manager, direct, no pack, with a standing item on what the operator needed next from the developer. The farmer, whose access agreement could stop cable installation on any given morning, got a visit before each phase of works and the site manager's mobile number. The parish council was told in writing that it would receive a quarterly update and a named contact, and that the developer would attend one council meeting before construction and one before energisation.
Nobody objected to the reduction, the council included, since they had never wanted a monthly newsletter. Discontinuing the quarterly meeting released about sixty person-hours across the programme. The energisation date moved once, by two weeks, and the developer heard about it eleven weeks before it would otherwise have found out.
For a PMP® candidate, what helps is seeing that engagement is a resource in finite supply, so a project manager unable to keep up with stakeholder commitments is describing an allocation problem. A response that works reduces something deliberately and tells the affected party, rather than letting the reduction happen through missed calls. Ask which stakeholders could change the outcome, because that is what should drive the plan. Practising on situations where the most senior person is not the most consequential one is a recurring exercise in a structured PMP exam preparation course.
Put a number against each row of the engagement plan: hours a month, yours and theirs. Then add the column up. Most plans come out at between a third and half a working week for the project manager, which is affordable, and about double what the stakeholders would agree to if anybody asked them. The rows to cut are the ones where nothing about the project would change if that person's view changed tomorrow.
Interested in going further?
Reducing what a stakeholder receives is straightforward once it has been said out loud, and corrosive when it happens by omission. Omega's PMP® Exam Preparation works through situations where the attention available is less than the stakeholder list implies.
Engagement appears among the things a project adjusts in the PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition.
Ad · Amazon affiliate link.
References
A141: Tailoring Stakeholder Engagement for Different Contexts
A135: Stakeholder Power Is Not the Same as Engagement
A133: Stakeholder Management vs Stakeholder Engagement
A136: Why Hostile Stakeholders Still Need Engagement
A077: Tailoring in Project Management: What It Actually Means
PMP and PMBOK are registered marks of the Project Management Institute, Inc.
