About a week ago, I was suddenly seconded to work on a new project. There was a half-hour meeting with my boss, Donna, and her boss, Linda. And voila, I walked out of the meeting with a new job.
In project management terms, this is a high-impact project. Many people, within and outside the organisation, have a keen desire to be involved and to see the project’s outcomes match their high expectations. In this case, ‘many’ can be defined as potentially thousands of individuals. (eek!)
This project will involve an intensive consultation phase where we try to gather as much input as possible, organise it, synthesise it and analyse it.
During the consultation phase we need to ensure those who have an opinion or idea are able to contribute to the conversation, by whatever means is most comfortable or convenient to them. Ideally, these participants should feel that their input is valued and appreciated (because it is).
At the conclusion of the consultation phase, we will write a 10-year strategy document and a more detailed action plan for the first few years. The strategy and action plan will need to be endorsed by several groups within the organisation — and we know from experience that those groups will not endorse something they don’t believe in.
We therefore have four main communication needs:
- publicity to raise awareness of the project and stimulate interest
- mechanisms that allow people to provide input to the project
- within the team, an efficient process for gathering, sharing and analysing input
- demonstrating to the decision-makers that the strategy is worthy of their endorsement
One of my main tasks this week was drafting a Stakeholder Engagement Strategy that will help us meet those communication needs.
I have blogged elsewhere about a simple process for developing a communication plan to support a small- to medium-sized project. The Stakeholder Engagement Strategy is a more sophisticated version of that process.
If you’d like to know more about developing and implementing a Stakeholder Engagement Strategy, stay tuned. I’ll blog about it here.
To find out what it’s like actually being one of those engaged stakeholders, do please consider how you could get involved with the project. A good place to start is the Information Futures Commission project web site. The site was launched today and is still quite small, but it will grow quite quickly in the next few weeks.
Do, please, let me know what you think of the project’s communication activities — leave a comment here at Plethaurus.com, or send me an email.
Tags: strategy, project management, planning, Information Futures Commission
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