Tag Archives: RICS

The first edition of the RICS / APM guidance note on Stakeholder Engagement is a missed opportunity. Hopefully the second edition will plug many of the glaring gaps.

The guide is built around ten principles:

• Principle 1: Communicate
• Principle 2: Consult early and often
• Principle 3: Remember they’re only human
• Principle 4: Plan it
• Principle 5: Relationships are key
• Principle 6: Simple, but not easy
• Principle 7: Just part of managing risk
• Principle 8: Compromise
• Principle 9: Understand what success is
• Principle 10: Take responsibility

All sound principles but in a strange order

Any complex endeavour needs a clear understanding of its objectives and then a plan to achieve the objectives before starting work, but ‘Understand what success is’, is at #9 and ‘Plan it’ at #4.  Surly the whole point of engaging stakeholder is to enhance the probability of success. Which means #1 understand what success is, #2 plan how to achieve success and then move into implementation.

But implementation needs focus, completely missing from the guide is any practical guidance on ways to understand the stakeholder community, prioritising the stakeholders so the communication effort is focused where needed and then managing the overall engagement effort for maximum effect. The best the guide can offer is a simplistic 2×2 matrix. My methodology, the Stakeholder Circle® is one of several that recognise the multiplicity of dimensions needed to understand a stakeholder, the outline is available free of charge from http://www.stakeholdermapping.com/stakeholder-circle-methodology/

The last omission is considering the path to stakeholder management maturity. The path to maturity is mapped at: http://www.stakeholdermapping.com/srmm-maturity-model/

I had hoped stakeholder engagement was moving beyond the soft ‘fluffy’ platitudes of the past into a pragmatic management process, allied to risk management, focused on maximising the aggregate benefit from a project to all of its stakeholders.  These ideas are in the RICS Stakeholder Engagement guide but unfortunately the guide lacks any guidance on how to achieve these objectives, with the exception of the CASE model in Appendix 3.

Hopefully the 2^nd Edition will not be too far away.

The 1^st Edition is available from http://www.rics.org/shop