The car’s stopped working. You use it every day and transit simply isn’t an option. Next year the kids will be needing braces too. Finding the money to cover everything will be a challenge. It shouldn’t come as a big surprise though: the car was never going to last forever and braces have always been on the cards. A little foresight and long-term planning would have helped things run a lot more smoothly.
As a critical tool in helping navigate the complex web of regulatory requirements and a company’s day-to-day needs, stakeholder information management can be seen in a similar context. Every engagement with a stakeholder is like a dollar waiting to be funneled into to a rainy-day fund. You never know when you’re going to need it but you’ll be glad it’s there when you do. Even seemingly unimportant interactions, such as diligently contacting a stakeholder group but never hearing back, can take on completely different connotations if the group contacts the regulator to complain that they were never consulted. From a regulatory perspective, if the activities are not documented, they might as well have never happened.
Stakeholder information management should be viewed as integral to a project’s success, not left to languish on the sidelines. If a backlog of fifty or so communications seems troubling now, just wait until it’s swelled into the thousands. The information merry-go-round will keep on turning regardless. How will you track all this? Left unchecked, catching up will become an almost impossible task, instead becoming an exercise in damage limitation.
There are two reasons why organizations fail to properly record communication from the get-go: they fail to grasp how crucial it is or simply don’t know how. It doesn’t have to be this way. Impact Resolutions has many years of expertise in implementing multi-stakeholder engagement tracking solutions. Using tools to support and effectively manage a process tailored to the specific needs of your project, we can work collaboratively to implement a company-wide protocol and coach engagement teams on the importance of record keeping best practices. A centralized database will record all engagement activities, and we’ll conduct regular audits to ensure both the quality and objectivity of the data as well as helping pinpoint potential gaps in information. We can customize the data to create specific reports for meetings, telephone conversations or emails.
With the success of a project standing or falling on the effectiveness of its stakeholder information management infrastructure, it’s surprising why many organizations barely give it a second thought. Impact Resolutions gives you a competitive edge to take the guesswork out of information management so you can focus on full engagement with your stakeholders.