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Insight #26 Stakeholder Management in Large Complex Programs – Step 3 -Stakeholder Issues
Dar Al Riyadh Insights reflects the knowledge and experience of our Board, executives, and staff in leading and providing PMC, design, and construction management services. Dar Al Riyadh believes in the importance of broadly sharing knowledge with our clients and staff to improve project outcomes for the benefit of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
The key steps in the overall stakeholder management process are discussed in this series of Insights. These activities and their effectiveness can have as much to do with shaping overall program success as the “hard” engineering, procurement, and construction activities undertaken.
In this Insight, we describe the third of six steps for managing stakeholders in large complex programs.
Step 3 -Stakeholder Issues
Having identified the stakeholders potentially influencing the performance and outcomes of the program, it is essential for the program manager to understand the various issues which may be important to each of the individual stakeholders. The identification of likely stakeholder issues can be accomplished through a variety of techniques and most large programs require the use of one or more approaches given the typically broad set of stakeholders involved.
Issue identification approaches include:
- Position statements previously prepared by the stakeholder group
- Research on prior stakeholder engagements; press releases; public statements
- Survey of any fundraising literature
- Surveys of potential stakeholders around typical major issue areas
- Stakeholder interviews
- Single or multi-stakeholder workshops
- Online forums
- Moderated blogs
Issues can be categorized and relative importance assessed. Where possible the core drivers should be identified so that they may be monitored through the program’s life-cycle. For example, a stakeholder group concerned with groundwater quality will become more active if major groundwater impacts are realized elsewhere as a result of broadly similar activities to those undertaken in the program being managed.
In particular, the program manager must understand issues of interest to multiple stakeholders.
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