Tailoring Stakeholder Engagement for Different Contexts
One engagement approach across a whole project is comfortable and almost never right. A project with tenants, a regulator, a software supplier and forty internal staff has four audiences standing in four different relationships to it, and treating them alike produces something too formal for three of them and not formal enough for the fourth.
What varies is narrower than it first appears. The practices are much the same everywhere. What moves is how formal they are, who holds the relationship, and how often contact happens.
Three dials, not a menu
Formality is the first. At one end sits a conversation and a note to self. At the other, a written position on headed paper with a date and a named signatory. Formality is not a measure of how much somebody matters; it follows what the communication has to do. Will anybody rely on it? Does it become evidence? Would being wrong about what was said cost something?
Ownership of the relationship is the second and is the least thought about. Some relationships have to sit with the project manager. Some belong to the sponsor and lose their weight the moment they are delegated downwards. Some belong properly to somebody in the business who will still be there long after the project finishes. Getting this wrong is expensive in a particular way: a relationship placed too low is ignored, and one placed too high cannot be used often enough to be worth anything.
Tempo is the third. Contact frequency should follow the rate at which the stakeholder's own situation changes and the rate at which the project produces anything they care about. Monthly for everybody is the default, and it is wrong at both ends of any real stakeholder list.
Four contexts that move the dials
Section 2.5.3 of the PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition covers how stakeholder practice adapts to its setting, and four settings account for most of the variation an ordinary project runs into.
Public and community stakeholders push formality up and tempo down. Statutory consultation has a defined period, a defined record and a requirement to show that responses were considered, and none of that is satisfied by a good conversation. The relationship usually belongs with a communications or community team who have done it before, and a project manager improvising here creates a legal exposure rather than a relationship.
Contractual stakeholders push the record up while leaving the relationship warm. A supplier's account manager can be a genuine ally, and everything agreed with them still has to exist in writing, because an informal agreement with a supplier is a variation nobody has priced. Keep the relationship easy and the record complete, which people treat as a contradiction and is not one.
Matrix and internal stakeholders move the ownership dial. The people a project needs have another manager whose priorities outrank the project's, so the engagement that counts is often with that manager and not with the person doing the work. A project that engages only the individual has built a relationship with somebody who cannot commit their own time.
Regulated settings turn communications into evidence. What was said, when, and on what basis becomes auditable, sometimes years later. The practical consequence is that a regulator or an assurance function needs a written position it can rely on, and an iterative, still-thinking-about-it style of engagement, which works beautifully with a product team, reads to them as an absence of control.
One housing association, and the regimes it ended up with
A consultancy was running an operating model change for a housing association: a new repairs service affecting about a hundred and eighty staff, a software supplier delivering the scheduling system, and around nine thousand tenants on the receiving end. The first draft of the engagement plan had one approach in it.
What it became looked nothing like itself. Tenants got a statutory consultation, run by the association's community team, with a defined period and a published summary of how responses had been handled. Staff engagement ran through line managers, because a repairs supervisor could not release an operative for a workshop without an area manager agreeing, and the area managers were the people who needed convincing. The supplier relationship was weekly, informal, friendly and minuted, with every agreed change confirmed by email the same day.
The regulator got two written position papers, nine months apart, on the association's letterhead and signed by the chief executive. That was the one the team nearly got wrong. Having built a good working relationship with the regulator's case officer, the instinct was to keep her informed as things developed, which is exactly how the supplier was being engaged and was working well. The association's director of governance stopped it. A regulator briefed informally through a period of change has been told a series of things that may turn out to be wrong, and has nothing to rely on when somebody asks what the association's position was in March. Two papers, each settled internally before it went out, gave her something she could use.
The total effort came to less than the single approach would have taken, because three of those regimes were run by people whose job it already was.
For a PMP® candidate, the setting a stakeholder works in comes before the choice of practice. A situation involving a regulator, a union, a statutory consultee or a supplier is telling you something about formality and about who should hold the relationship, and a response that engages them the way you would engage a colleague answers a different question. The useful test is what a communication would have to do if somebody relied on it a year later. Reading a setting correctly takes exposure to settings you do not work in, and a structured PMP exam preparation course brings those into the room.
Group the stakeholder list by setting rather than by importance, and set the three dials once per group. Most projects finish up with three or four groups and about a dozen decisions in total, which is less work than a per-person plan and considerably more use than one approach applied to everybody. Then check who owns each group, because on most projects at least one group is being engaged by the wrong person.
Interested in going further?
The same warmth that builds a supplier relationship can leave a regulator with nothing to rely on. Omega's PMP® Exam Preparation works through situations where the right engagement depends on the setting as much as the person.
The stakeholder domain's tailoring considerations are set out in the PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition.
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References
A082: Tailoring Stakeholder Engagement
A135: Stakeholder Power Is Not the Same as Engagement
A077: Tailoring in Project Management: What It Actually Means
A133: Stakeholder Management vs Stakeholder Engagement
A122: Tailoring Schedule Management for Adaptive Delivery
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