To Engage and Communicate with Stakeholders
As a best practice, when you have stakeholders in remote locations, consider assigning a sub-team lead/main point of contact for them. The benefits of doing so are many. For the sub-team leads/main point of contact, it provides them with the ability to take on a leadership role and build relationships with stakeholders within the organization. For the stakeholders, it enables them to feel cared for and increases commitment and support for your project.
When stakeholders are remote, and you have not assigned a main point of contact with them, it is much more difficult to engage them and to ensure they feel as if they are being listened to and heard.
A sub-team lead/main point of contact can assist in engaging stakeholders by:
- Holding status meetings to share information about the project
- Checking in with stakeholders to see if they have any questions or concerns
- Sharing information between the project managers and the stakeholders
- Providing training and/or support upon implementation or transition of the project
- Being the main point of contact on-site for all things project-related
In summary, using sub-team leads to be the main point of contact for stakeholders at remote sites enables for better engagement of stakeholders. When we engage our stakeholders, we increase buy-in, commitment and support for our projects, increasing project success overall.
Thanks for your thoughts Scott. Sub-team leads don’t even have to be formally used within an organization. There are usually folks on the team looking to take on a leadership role (and fully capable of doing so) and I task them with sub-team leads. You are absolutely correct that this a great way to groom someone looking to move up/gain visibility. It is beneficial (both for us and the other individual!) when we can enable for opportunities for others to shine. Thanks for reading!
I’ve used this technique very successfully and have plans to use it again for some coming projects. I see the key benefits of having a point-person at the remote site are providing input to the project and helping communicate to people at that site.
A third, and unexpected, benefit that I’ve found is that the point-person role is a good way to groom someone looking to move up or gain some visibility. For instance, a contact center agent who acts as point-person for a VOIP telephony project may then be poised to join a tech team in the future, or become their facility tech-team leader.