Stakeholder Engagement

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Effective Stakeholder Engagement is at the heart of any effective business consultancy service, and is one of the foundations of the services we provide at Aardvark Associates. The opinions, insights and feedback obtained from a diverse selection of relevant stakeholders forms the basis of any well-informed service.

From the offset we strive to define a detailed and diverse list of stakeholders to help provide us with the clearest picture of the environment we are entering and providing a service for. Often this will involve stakeholders, both internal and external to an organisation.

We aim to keep our scope and our minds open to ensure that we engage with the right people, the group of which often evolves throughout the lifecycle of a project.

Our key Stakeholder Engagement principles are defined below. We aim to:

• Engage stakeholders early and often throughout a project’s lifecycle – establishing contact at an early juncture allows us to introduce the project and prepare stakeholders for any upcoming engagements avoiding potential double-bookings and ensures that stakeholders feel involved in the process.
• Communicate clearly – limit confusion with our purpose and obtain the type of information we are looking for
• Establish clear and agreed feedback loops to the Project Team – ensuring they are adequately informed and able to feedback key information in a prompt and timely fashion
• Planning & Recording – allows the most efficient use of time and resources to be arranged in advance and provides a clear picture of the engagement activities carried out for review and assessment
• Allocate time and resources accordingly – relative importance of all stakeholders will be assessed in order to establish a weighted hierarchy against the project requirements
• People are people – understanding that we are engaging with human beings is important to keep in focus
• Building relationships – stakeholders are rarely engaged with on a single occasion, so establishing a functional relationship with them ensures a more efficient and enjoyable engagement. It far easier to fact check, setup further engagements and obtain any extra content/information when a positive relationship has been established
• What does success look like? – Understanding what the desired output of a project is will drive the selection of stakeholders and the types of engagements that will be carried out
• Responsibility – The responsibility for conducting an effective stakeholder engagement project is shared throughout the project team as no one individual can provide the level of service we are accustomed to providing