Striking Project Management
Project Management Consulting
I recently gave stakeholder engagement presentation at the International Project Management Association (IPMA) conference in Greece discussing some of the latest tools and techniques that cloud and social media tools can play in projects to increase stakeholder engagement and improve communication in projects.
I have written about the importance of project communication for effective stakeholder engagement and this article goes deeper into the strategies I have used in the past to improve stakeholder engagement with effective communication and project management tools.
Chris: I want to give you a bit of an overview on how we can use cloud- based project management tools to improve stakeholder engagement. This was a part of a larger presentation. This one’s focusing purely down on the communications side. I was involved in a project a couple years ago and it involved probably 400 total stakeholders across multiple countries, various states. The challenge is how you maintain those communication levels and effectively engage with other stakeholders. I’ll touch on a bit of the project background, why I think it’s important, some of the guiding principles that we learnt on the way, what worked, what didn’t work, and then share some of the tools that we used.
The project was only fairly small in budget, about $2 million dollars. There was a commitment there to use project management tools. Four hundred stakeholders across three countries and many states in Australia so there are some challenges there in how you communicate effectively.
Why I think stakeholder engagement is important. In today’s society of globalized projects we’re more and more looking to bridge countries, bridge states. Really, companies are generally acting in more countries than one so the communication is a lot more challenging than what is was before.
If we look at the cost of influence graph taken from PMBoK, it basically shows that the cost of change increases exponentially as a project lifecycle moves through.
If we look at the average interest levels of stakeholders and engagement levels of stakeholders, it runs generally fairly interested early on in the project and then there’s a gradual decline in interest levels and stakeholder engagement levels. This changes depending on the project and the size. It starts to increase again towards the end as the project nears its handover point or the transfer of risk where that project becomes business as usual and into the stakeholders’ ownership. Then they start to be a little bit more involved in a project, dig a little bit deeper, ask for changes, and request new functionality. That’s one of the inherent problems we have. If we look at that overlaid with the cost/time curve, we can see that right in the part where we don’t want change, there’s a lot more engagement and involvement, so that brings a lot more change.
Some of the challenges that I think we face daily with stakeholders is generally quite difficult to do. It’s difficult to engage with stakeholders and communicate with them, particularly across multiple countries, multiple states, different time zones. There are constant repetitive requests for information and project updates. You’ll be walking through the building and you get asked for an update by five different people. You tend to set up elevator pitch in your head, “If I get held up, I’m just going to say that and keep moving.” There’s repetitive reporting. You get asked to present a paper or a monthly report and that’s then shown to three different committees, control groups every month. It’s just repetition.
Then the impacts that stakeholders can have on the cost and the schedule as we saw in the engagement graph, it can be quite detrimental to a project. I think that there’s an increased chance of a perceived failure. Even if the project is delivered on time, on budget, if stakeholders didn’t feel effectively engaged and communicated with, they still feel the project was a failure from their point of view. You get to this point and that’s really what’s going stay in the mind of the stakeholders after the project ends, “Well, Chris didn’t communicate very well. We won’t use him for that project again.” They’re really the key points we’re trying to overcome by using cloud-based tools to communicate and really engage with our stakeholders.
Some of the key points of the solution is, number one, use cloud- based project management tools to share schedule and share information. There are hundreds and hundreds on the market. The other side of it is using social communication tools to engage and increase interaction and try to facilitate that two-way communication. Ted did a presentation yesterday on particularly aspect of social media tools and some of the successes they’ve had in construction projects.
What I think is an interesting paradigm shift in the way we communicate with social tools is really changing the shift to more small and targeted chunks of information. Really, rather than putting out a weekly or monthly four-page update, you can change your communication style to be almost issues based and action based, so a lot of hourly snippets of relevant information and moving away from this static monthly reporting cycle.
With that comes constant, frequent information. Again, active, live updates as relevant to the project as it’s moving through the lifecycle. Even if it’s not two-way communication, just that constant push out of information that’s relevant, stakeholders generally feel more involved in the project and are more engaged in the process.
Obviously, the end game is to try and get that push/pull communication style. That is a challenge. The take-ups are coming. It’s getting that push/pull style we’re starting to come through but it is a challenge. Most of the communication style using social tools tends to be one way even though we all want it to be two way. That’s okay.
If we shift now to cloud engagement and project management tools and things, the goal is really to gain stakeholders’ support. We want to get stakeholders onside and keep them onside and increase relevant communication. Relevant is really the keyword there. Obviously, then, that comes with decreased repetitive communication.
If we get it right, there should be fewer issues and fewer changes that are stakeholder led. If we increase that stakeholder engagement level early on and maintain that high level, then that should bring fewer changes. That hopefully will get informed stakeholders. We do that by sending out only relevant and concise bits of information targeted to each stakeholder.
Less time writing reports and updates and we get interested and engaged stakeholders. These are the wins that we get by using cloud-based technology. Then there’s an increased chance of success, particularly in the reduction of the perceived failure from lack of communication. That’s really the goal.
Some of the key tools that we’ve come across, and this is just a selection of about a few, Twitter is a great example. It restricts you to 140 characters. It really forces you, if you’re going to use Twitter as part of your communication channel, that each burst of information can only be 140 characters long. You really need to consider what the relevant and concise information that you want to send out in that burst.
Some of the more scheduling tools. AtTask, 5pm, Huddle, Manymoon, Basecamp not so much. There are a lot of cloud-based scheduling tools. You can create your schedule into the cloud. It’s access for an anywhere browser. Then all the tasks can be completed and updated live. It’s very transparent for every stakeholder to see what’s happening, what’s being completed.
Project blogs are another great one where you can create a central repository for your information. Like what Lez showed with Google Docs, a project blog is your home for all the information. That’s where everything gets filtered back into. There you can store all your project documents or your thread of discussions around change, issues, all your management, all your documents stored in the project blog. It’s sort of becoming key to this communications style, really having that one central place that people can go to. They know all the information will be there. Then you send out bursts from other means via Twitter or your schedule and other tools such as that.
With all that information, there’s then the risk of mass information. We’re getting too much information on a daily basis. I’ll come back to Brisbane and probably have a thousand emails in my inbox. Everyone’s probably got the same experience. Basically we receive too much information on a daily basis. Particularly with this style, it really needs to be focused on target, relevant, and specific information to each stakeholder group. That’s the key. If you’re just sending out bursts of information, you won’t get the buy-in. It needs to be easier for stakeholders to review information in this manner than in the traditional static style of communication. Again, we want to try, as much as we can, to facilitate pull- and push-based communication styles.
Some of the resistance points that we came across when we put this into a project is you still need to do stakeholder planning. You still want to select your stakeholder groups and identify what the sensitivities are and what communication styles that they want to be involved in and the information they want to see.
It can be one way. We thought it would be a great two-way bit of information. It didn’t work that way. It does take a lot of time and effort to build a two-way communication style, but that didn’t reduce the effectiveness of the communication. Even though it was one way, for the most part the engagement levels increased dramatically. For most people, it is outside their standard work flow. For most of us, email is our go to communication tool. It does take a bit of effort to move away from that. You really need to constantly be pushing back saying, “Use a project blog or use the Twitter feed for that.”
Availability to the internet, that’s getting less and less of a problem but that’s not always the case. If you do have some remote teams, you need to consider that internet availability and reliability and the demographic of your stakeholders. Some of the older stakeholders didn’t want to use the tool. It was another tool they had to use. We had general success when they delegated down through a PA or a champion that could then relay the information back to them. If you do have an old demographic that isn’t technically savvy, maybe look for a PA or someone else that can be involved in the communications cycle.
There’s a cost and time to implement. Most of those tools come at a monthly fee. Some are free. There’s going to be resourcing and things required, so just have a consideration on that.
Some of the guiding principles to make it successful, this is sort of a reflection on some of the lessons that we learnt along the way.
I think communication is probably the core of stakeholder engagement across the board. If we can increase communication that is, transparent, responsive, that should follow with increased stakeholder engagement and more informed and active stakeholders.
That’s pretty much it. I’d love to hear and connect with me on all those different channels, share some of your experiences in using social tools and cloud project management tools for stakeholder engagement in your projects, and let me know what worked and what didn’t work. I’d love to hear your feedback from any of those channels.
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I'm "Chris O". I've managed hundreds of millions of dollars worth of projects since the inception of my career. I love helping others figure out the intricacies of project management on any scale. Come find me on twitter or google+
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[…] held in a different city each year. Last year the conference was held in Greece, where I presented Stakeholder Engagement Using Cloud Project Management and Social Media, this year it s being held in […]
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