Dictionary Series: What do we mean when we talk about meaningful stakeholders' engagement?
By Fraser Macdonald, Deputy Director, Data for Children Collaborative.
What do we mean by stakeholders?
At the Data for Children Collaborative, we work across a broad range of themes, all of which are aimed at significantly impacting children’s lives globally. We have many ways to tackle these issues, including our innovative Impact Collaborations process, which enables us to build diverse, multi-disciplinary and geographical spread teams. . As with any high-impact project, stakeholder engagement is crucial to its success, and when we talk about stakeholders, we are not just talking about the project delivery team, and the challenge owner and/or end user, but all those individuals and organisations that can add or receive value from being involved in some way during the project lifecycle. At the Collaborative, we have a simple philosophy –
“let’s create speed boats, not cruise ships’.”
How to balance communication with agility
We’ve all been there. You start work on a project with a small team, everyone is on board, knows where they’re going, and enjoying the voyage. Then, over time, more and more people take an interest – the destination is far too appealing not to hop on! “The more, the merrier!” everyone says. The larger the team, the more significant the impact at the end – All aboard! Before you know it, the boat is massive, everyone wants to go somewhere different, everything moves much slower, and you never actually make port. Your project ends up forever sailing around, watching the shore – wishing you could land and have a real impact.
Learning from experience
We learnt this the hard way. Some of our earlier project teams fed back to us that they felt swamped by stakeholders, slowing their progress and causing dreaded scope drift throughout the work. It was never the intention of a stakeholder to do this – they are just excited to be part of the conversation and want to ensure the project’s success. But, to a project team working on complex issues under tight deadlines, this can be distracting.
We are fortunate at the Collaborative to work on some incredibly high-impact work. Be it understanding how UNICEF can use technology for positive mental health or mapping predictive adolescent HIV risk. All our projects have a tangible goal, driven by an end-user who is engaged through the project from development to delivery. When projects can impact so many people, you are inclined to be encouraged to pull a wide variety of stakeholders into the room. You want the impact of your work to take hold, and including more stakeholders seems like the obvious way to do this.
Very quickly, your high-impact project quickly grows into a full-blown complex consortium, requiring constant onboarding, updating, and changes in direction. These projects rapidly slow down, and closing off can become near impossible as the original view of ‘success’ becomes increasingly blurred.
How do we manage our stakeholder relationships?
At the Collaborative, we have adopted an approach likened to a much faster speed boat. Our collaborative teams are much smaller than you’d first anticipate, given the scale of impact we set out to deliver. We work with the team to build a list of stakeholders that grows and changes as the project progresses. The Collaborative takes ownership of these relationships, setting out a clear engagement plan that doesn’t impact or distract the core project team. Using our internal Client Relationship Manager (CRM), we have split our communication strategy into simple categories; Team, Specific, Ad Hoc & General. In addition, we use a standard matrix to assign roles and responsibilities across the project – we use a RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed) Matrix to break down a stakeholder’s role. General stakeholders receive updates across our entire portfolio, separated by our themes – giving them a holistic view of our activities regularly. All our stakeholders are assigned to specific projects, and each of those projects are categorised in a number of ways. This enables our team to quickly tailor updates for stakeholders who may have more nuanced interests. For example; specific countries, unique data types, or even news relating to a data science technique.
When the time is right, we will pull a collaborator into a stakeholder update and get input where necessary. Through this approach, our project delivery team can stay on course and concentrate on delivering their outputs, confident that the stakeholders will be there when they finally make port, ready to implement, disseminate, or leverage the outcomes and generate real impact.
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