Cue-X Case Study
Stakeholder Engagement and Management
In my 20+ years of being involved in major programs, transformations and organisations at senior levels, stakeholder engagement (and lack there of) continues to be a major challenge. Working in government for the last 7 years, stakeholder engagement has been one of the most critical tools across the organisational change management suite. Helping leaders understand who they should be engaging, when, what outcomes we want to achieve and measuring its success is often a reactive activity that occurs as pain points and feedback calls out ‘lack of engagement’.
Leaders that a relationship builders are critical to driving effective engagement, but often they are too busy with operational issues to sit down and work through the relationships and engagements required for success.
PROSCI outlines beautiful relationship management charts, sponsorship maps and much more and there are incredible CRM tools perfect for tracking everything on engagement. In my experience, these are difficult to manage over long periods of time, becoming administration overheads and always out of date with the speed of engagements and insights.
This is what I have seen work best in organisations:
1. Break it down into bite sized chunks. Long-term strategies and plans are good for the change and communication and engagement teams, but make it simple for leaders. Constrict it to the next board meeting, decision, launch or announcement with these are the engagements we need to have, who is doing them, the outcome desired, collateral etc.;
2. In the Change, Communication or Engagement team be clear on what are the key milestones across the organisation are as these will help shape engagement requirements. You will need to be proactive as rarely will leaders we need this until it is too late! I like to use a shared calendar for this so that everyone can see major activies and engagements and add more (if you are lucky!);
3. Create a simple list of stakeholders. Start small not big. The tendency is to do everyone. Start with the key decision makers or influencers who will make a difference and build from there. Small numbers to start with not massive excel documents with hundreds of names. The more heavy and big this list is, the less it will be used and less value it will provide leaders. You want to invest most time on helping the engagements be effective not building a list;
Stakeholder engagement is about building trust, credibility and commitment for your vision. It takes time, strategic thinking and commitment to your audience. The more effort put into working with your leaders and those that engage the most to set up the right structure and manage it day to day, the more likely it is to succeed.
One of the key learnings I had from a major ICT implementation that I led the Organisational Change Management team on was the value of engaging people face to face. It is extremely difficult in global organisations working in different time-zones, locations etc. but the closer you get to the stakeholder and see it through their lense the more confidence they will have in you and what you are doing.
In a major government client, we visted all the major sites and spoke to the leadership teams, technical teams and wider user teams to understand their concerns, business operations and how best we could implement the change for them. We also clearly managed expectations. We adapted the message for the audience as the change was implemented we were open about what worked and didn’t and how we were managing it.
This approach meant that as we implemented and things didn’t go to plan, we were able to quickly work with the sites and key leaders who we knew and fix their problems. We had stoppages, priority incidents and much more, but they were minimised by the fact that we had relationships in place where people could reach out to us, raise issues quickly and we knew what they needed. It was an incredible investment by the client but it led to one of the fastest most successful ICT transformations being delivered on-time, on budget. It was also seen as one of the most successful organisational change implementation programs in the department. At the time, it was hated by all, but at the finale, the organisation had a huge uplift in capability, increased security, user experience and were now on an evergreen pathway of improvements.
Engagement takes time, effort, thinking and significant leadership commitment. Too often I have seen leaders dismiss it as it is not the fastest path and it takes effort and presents reputational risk. However this is a short term view that if not applied early will create substantial reputational risk in the future and inevitably a lot of rework to repair relationships, brands, reputations and trust. Make it simple and the right fit for the organisation. Worry less about the fancy tools, administration and get into the activity of talking to leaders about engagement.
4. Measure it – there are a number of ways to do this, but I find the ADKAR model is the simplest and easy for leaders to understand and see success or challenges. You need to be reporting on progress and sharing it regularly with leaders. Think what is the level of commitment and influence as well which is really helpful;
5. Engage your leaders regularly so they see the progress, actions and take ownership. You need to talk to them about what is working and not and getting them to provide the scores so they can see where things are green, amber and red.
6. Use a system that is right for the organisation. I have seen some extravagant CRM’s which work beautifully but for most organisations something simple that is accessible to all without training and is part of everyday activities usually works best. Don’t get caught building something the objective here is to help out in engagements now;
7. Don’t expect wide usage of the system – leaders won’t provide comments and feedback of their engagements in a system (rarely). This will need to happen face to face and be translated back into a tool for capturing insights and measuring;
8. Get leadership teams together to talk engagement and what they think about engagement effectiveness, roadblocks and who are best to be relationship managers. You need time to think about people to help get them to where you need to be;
9. There needs to be a strong link back to actions. Engagement is about listening and acting. It is not one off so how do you make sure actions are captured, acted on and responded to so stakeholders build trust in you and what you are doing;
10. Repeat the exercise, measure again, improve and continue to create links back to the organisational outcomes and how engagement is supporting this.
About CUE-X
CUE-X has a team of experienced consultants and contractors that work across many of the major federal government agencies. CUE-X specialises in the advice, delivery, management, recruitment, training and development of ICT programmes, voice of customer, customer data, business transformation, programme management and organisational change. CUE-X is a gold partner of the Customer Data Institute with a team that has deep expertise in customer relationship management, data platforms, governance, privacy and security. Dan Marks is the Chief Executive Officer of CUE-X and has more than 20 years experience across government, Australian and global organisations. Dan is based in Canberra and works in government across major ICT program delivery. For more information…