Is lack of community and stakeholder management scoped as a risk to your project

‍ Projects will struggle, and often fail, without solid stakeholder management. Securing community buy-in with clear communication and genuine engagement is the key to ensuring people are on board with new infrastructure.   

Understanding and managing risk is a standard part of running a project, but how often do infrastructure builders consider a lack of community engagement as a threat to success of the project? In fact, underestimating community stakeholders, or excluding them altogether, can add extra challenges to a project’s progress or even end it. 

Community stakeholders include nearby businesses and residents, community groups, environmental groups, and special interest groups.  

University of Melbourne’s Next Generation Engagement Program estimates community opposition has contributed to delay, cancellation or mothballing of more than $20 billion in infrastructure projects across Australia over the past decade! Even so, there is still a one-dimensional view of how to quantify and track the risks. 

Every infrastructure project should use a simple equation to estimate the ‘costs per day’ (or month) to deliver. This can then be used to quantify potential cost of delays due to poor management of interfaces, approvals and community buy-in.

It may appear that as the project team, your main focus is to maintain motivation of team members and workers, manage time and costs, and keep the client happy. But without due attention to community engagement, your schedule and budget is at risk of blowing out, and this quantifiable measure helps demonstrate by how much.   

On the flipside, fostering a good relationship with the community makes it easier to accommodate unforeseen situations that may involve changes or delays. It also opens the door to collaboration and even innovative solutions.

My team and I have helped save millions of dollars in implementation costs by collaborating with the community and contractors on expedited construction approaches, and these have very tangibly improved construction production rates and reduced duration of impacts on neighbours. These benefits can only be realised by having a keen interest in, and talking proactively with, the community. Understanding their goals and constraints can help you build solutions that provide a win-win during construction. 

So, how should you go about communicating with these external parties? 

The first word 

First, look around before starting work. Think about the people who might directly or indirectly benefit from, impacted by, or interested in your project. These are the people (stakeholders) that you need to communicate with, either directly or by navigating the relationships you already have in the community, such as local councils.

Contact these people as early as possible in the process so you can understand their issues and expectations, and plan how to work with them through project delivery. That way, you can tailor your messaging to address particular issues before they become a big deal. Different stakeholders require different information – the local council might need technical information, whereas neighbours will want to know how they will be affected. 

Being forewarned, people can adequately understand and prepare for impacts that are likely to affect them. We might work in construction every day and understand the impacts, noise and challenges, but often project neighbours and stakeholders won’t. In particular, avoid complacency if you're working in an open environment. You might imagine people are used to noise, interruptions and traffic, but these things are more heightened in an open environment.  

Partner with the people 

Engaging with the community is not just about risk mitigation. It can actually provide benefits to your project as well. It’s easy to underestimate the value of stakeholder insights into a construction program and methodologies. As infrastructure experts, we know a lot about planning, designing, and delivering infrastructure projects, but people external to the project team may have insights, local knowledge or an ability to participate in the project in a way we may not have thought possible, presenting you with an opportunity to improve the project. 

When engineers leave their desks, they may experience unexpected benefits by engaging with different types of people. They may find they learn a different perspective that changes how they consider an issue. It could save the project time and money. We've had fantastic opportunities on projects where we’’ve used stakeholder knowledge to unlock expedited construction program ideas. We also had a stakeholder request that prompted us to build something differently that ended up reducing costs.  

These conversations prevent inaccurate assumptions from hindering your project. For example, many times we're in locations where there's a perception that the stakeholder is going to prefer day works because of their situation and they want to be able to sleep at night. In our role as engagement communications specialists, we’ve gone out and spoke to them and found they’d prefer to stay with relatives for the project duration. All of a sudden, we’ve been able to help shorten the construction program, because we can do day as well and night works. Opportunities wouldn't exist without having conversations, so go out and have them. 

Insider news 

Finally, engagement is not just for external parties: make sure internal stakeholders are also on board with everything going on in the project. Major stakeholders, from the client – whether that’s the government or a private company – to the construction contractors, need to work in partnership. That means they need to engage with one another. 

Context is extremely important. People want to know what you're talking about, how it's come about, and why it matters to you. Project managers are busy people, so it’s not unusual to have a meeting where they want to dive straight in, but it’s important to make sure to give the other people there enough background so the meeting is worthwhile. 

Simply explaining a little bit more about what you're trying to achieve, or what pressures you're under, makes things relatable. By giving people an understanding about where you're coming from, you can have difficult conversations about a delivery issue that might mean millions of dollars on an infrastructure project. If you’re not communicating well, you’re not giving each other a chance to perform well. 

In general, think of engagement as the ability to have honest conversations, no matter how difficult. Your stakeholders need to know what’s going on, and the project team needs to keep track of opportunities and threats that could support or hinder the project.  

It’s about creating ownership of the asset at all levels, a way to win hearts and minds so that when it’s complete, everyone can point to the road and feel proud of their contribution.

We don't do this job for the flexible working hours. We do it because we love what we do, and we believe that we're leaving long-term legacies for communities. This all starts with engagement.