Welcome to our Impactful Projects and Planning Microtraining Series! I'm Jami Yazdani and I started Yazdani Consulting and Facilitation to help people solve management problems. Through our project management and project coaching services, our planning support and through leadership and management trainings, like the series, I'm able to support my clients in getting things done. In this first session of our series, we're going to be talking about stakeholder engagement. If you're watching during the premiere of this training, please engage with me in the chat or comments. I'll be responding in real time. If you're watching this video after the premiere, feel free to leave comments and I'll respond as soon as I can. You can also reach out to me directly - visit yazdaniconsulting.com/ipp for all ways to connect about this training.

So let's get started and discuss some simple strategies for engaging with our community of stakeholders during strategic planning and when managing and leading projects. So first, let's talk about why we we want to engage with our stakeholders. Why should we engage with a broader variety of stakeholders during our planning and projects? When we're doing strategic planning, we tend to want to get input from our community and feedback throughout the planning process, input and feedback that we can incorporate into our plan. A key component of making our planning process a community effort, rather than a leadership activity, is getting stakeholder input and feedback, engaging with our stakeholders. Involving our stakeholders is going to create buy-in for our plan and implementing our plan. If we want our plan to have an impact, if we want to create real change, if we wanted to drive effort for our stakeholders, we need to involve and engage them during the planning process.

Now when leading and managing projects, we also want to engage with our stakeholders. It's just as important. Projects are collaborative efforts, and getting input and feedback from our project partners, team members, clients or users, is really critical to project success. The more we engage with our stakeholders, the better our project planning becomes. We're able to identify risks and potential problems, get feedback to improve project outcomes, and lead a more effective and collaborative project team. In both strategic planning and project management, it can be tempting to limit our stakeholder involvement to those few folks who can move our plan or project forward quickly and without a lot of challenge. Right? Perhaps we involve a handful of leaders in our strategic planning process to easily reach consensus. Or we move forward with an isolated, small project team so that we can streamline our project tasks. But we know that including a variety of stakeholders is going to impact our decision making and our outcomes, with inclusion tending to improve those outcomes. And to make our planning process, whether it's strategic planning or project planning, more effective and impactful. So when should we be including stakeholders in our our processes? When it comes to strategic planning. many planning processes focus on engagement just prior to the drafting phase. Here's my Impactful Strategic Planning Process - it's a relatively simple 6-step process - and it includes that engage and gather phase common to most other processes, because this is where we really focus on engaging with stakeholders and gathering information. But kind of baked into my Impactful Planning Process is significant stakeholder engagement throughout all six stages or phases of the planning process. And so we want to engage with our stakeholders not just during that engage and gather phase, but really during every phase, from planning to plan to drafting a plan to implementing and assessing our plan. So ideally we're engaging with stakeholders at all of these points. Now with project management, there are lots of opportunities to engage various stakeholders throughout a project's lifecycle. Now project timelines, project lifecycles, really can vary depending on on your project, your industry. But project management best practices encourage a focus on planning for stakeholder involvement and on communicating effectively with your stakeholders. I have an Impactful Project Management Approach that advocates for a lot of stakeholder engagement. So it integrates planning for stakeholders across five focus areas, and focuses on them specifically in one area, and also when strategically delivering your project outcomes. My approach also talks about intentional communication and collaboration techniques that can help you engage your stakeholders. Again, ideally we are engaging with key stakeholders throughout the project lifecycle. So how do we do this? What what are some of these strategies? So let's talk about, first, some some strategies when we're doing strategic planning. Now obviously there are lots of strategies but in this short training, I really just want to talk to you about four strategies that I think can create the most impact with the least amount of effort. And so, the first, and perhaps the simplest, is to share and update our broader audience, our broader community of stakeholders, throughout the planning process. So whether it's via social media, email, whatever format makes the most sense for your community, let your community know that you're planning to plan, what your timeline and process is, and keep them updated throughout the process. Rather than engaging at one or two key points, or waiting until you've finalized your draft and sharing it with your community then, sharing throughout the process invites your community into the story of your plan. It creates a narrative that they can care about. I often hear from folks about lengthy surveys or forums used during strategic planning, and while these have their place, particularly in that engaging and gather stage, I've found that some very simple three-question surveys can generate a lot of useful feedback, from both internal and external stakeholders. When gathering information to create a plan, I encourage organizations to ask three questions. First, ask what is working well. Now how this is phrased is really going to depend on what your organization does or offers, and the particular stakeholder audience. But you want to know from them what they like most about what you're currently doing. Next ask how you can improve, and then ask if there's anything else that they'd like to share. You can use these questions to facilitate conversations and forums, in an email survey or on social media. And, of course, these can be revised and reworded for different stakeholder groups, from internal staff to clients to community members. Similarly, once you've written that draft plan, share that draft for feedback with key stakeholder groups again asking three simple questions: What do you like most about the plan? What is missing from the plan? and Is there anything else that you'd like to share? I've asked these questions to get really useful feedback that resulted in some changes to my plan.

The last thing that you can do is develop implementation objectives as part of your strategic planning process. After you get to and share that final draft of a plan, pull together your internal teams, partners, and work with them to develop measurable and specific objectives for achieving the plan's strategic goals. So let's say you have a three-year strategic plan, and you have a handful of strategic goals or priorities that you want to achieve. You can create six-month or one-year implementation objectives for how you're going to achieve those goals, repeating this process throughout the plan's timeline. These objectives answer the question, "What are we going to do right now, in this short time frame, to start achieving this strategic goal? Implementation objectives drive effort, they keep your plan from becoming irrelevant because you can create objectives that reflect your current environment, and they also offer opportunities to measure and show progress toward those longer-term goals. And, of course, you should share these objectives and your progress toward implementing them with your community of stakeholders. So let's talk about some of the ways that we can engage with stakeholders when we're managing projects. There are so many strategies for engaging with your stakeholders but I'm going to talk about four that I think are really a good place to start, particularly in the early planning phases of a project. So the first thing that we want to do is kind of step back and make sure that we've clearly identified our key stakeholder groups, thinking broadly and inclusively about who those stakeholders could be. We should consider who will be impacted by the project itself or the project outcomes. So this could be clients or users, this could be other departments, internal staff, partners, vendors. You can also think about who will be involved in implementing the project, doing the work of the project, or involved with implementing the project outcomes, again, this could be clients or users, but it could also be our project team and decision makers. So once we know who our stakeholders are, we can think about the role that we want them to play in our project. We want to ask the who, what, when, and how for doing things related to the project and knowing things about the project. So who needs updates on the project? Who really needs to be tracking progress? Who needs to give feedback or test outcomes that we've created, deliverables? Who's going to be performing tasks? Who's going to be making decisions? So when and how will these folks be informed about the project? So you want to consider the roles that the stakeholders are going to play and communicate with them. Plan for communicating with them so that they can play that role effectively. And when you integrate stakeholder planning and communication planning with your other project planning for scope, outcomes and schedule, you can get to an actionable plan that's going to create a more collaborative and successful project. So that's a super quick introduction to some simple strategies for engaging with a wider variety of stakeholders through a strategic planning process and when managing your projects. If you'd like more support or information on stakeholder engagement, you can visit our impactful planning page at yazaniconsulting.com/impactful-planning. We've got a free Impactful Planning Guide, information about our Impactful Strategic Planning course, and ways to schedule time to talk with me about planning. If you visit our project coaching page at yasaniconsulting.com/project-coaching, you can learn more about our project management support. Our project coaching on sessions in particular allow us to offer our clients actionable advice to help you successfully manage your own projects. So we can talk through strategies for how you can engage your specific community of stakeholders. So thank you so much for participating in our Impactful Projects and Planning microtraining series. Visit yazdaniconsulting.com/ipp to see info about the series - all the sessions will be posted there -l earn about upcoming premieres, and connect with us about this series. Thank you!