Engaging and Maintaining Stakeholder Interest

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Program Management   Stakeholder Management  

Programs can be complex. They usually involve a number of different business areas--and in most cases, not all of those areas will be equally engaged for the entire duration of the project. Instead, activity levels for each group will ebb and flow with the different projects within the program. Inevitably, that will result in varying levels of interest and engagement from the program stakeholders representing those areas--they will want to be heavily engaged when their groups are impacted by program activities, and disengaged at other times.

From a program management standpoint, that approach simply can’t work. While there is no requirement for all stakeholders to be equally engaged at all times, there does need to be a minimum level of involvement with the program that needs to be maintained. Without this minimum, stakeholders won’t be able to remain aware of what is happening--and program managers will be unable to facilitate appropriate decisions and approvals. In this article, I want to look at how program stakeholders need to perform--and suggest ways to ensure that occurs.

The stakeholder engagement flow
In most programs there is a predictable flow to the level of engagement that is needed from any stakeholder. The flow for individual stakeholders will vary from their colleagues depending on the work that is scheduled and the impact of that work; …

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