ICT benefits realisation consultancy

Stakeholder engagement

The engagement of stakeholders is one of the most vital components in the acceptance and use of technology in organisations. Engaging your users and organisational stakeholders will help to reduce frustrations and negative attitudes and help to maximise the benefits gained from the technology.

How you will benefit

Effective stakeholder engagement can help ensure that your dominant organisational culture is positive and receptive to the use of new technology. Stakeholder engagement will reduce resistance to change and help to:

• Encourage ownership and buy-in at all tiers of the organisation, avoiding mandated usage
• Foster positive user adoption and promote novel usage
• Help ensure benefits are maximised across the frontline and the organisation
• Highlight potential risks
• Help identify and activate internal resources for supporting the project
• Help ensuring that time and resource demanding interventions are minimised
• Help you to make the appropriate strategic and financial decisions through having a clear understanding of staff requirements

What we do

We work with you to develop and identify the most effective methods for fostering user engagement and the acceptance of new technology within your organisation. We actively engage with your users and organisational stakeholders to identify methods for generating buy-in to the project and to identify and help resolve the issues that are restricting the acceptance and use of technology. To achieve this we draw on a range of methodologies, these may include informal conversations with users; exploratory techniques such as group work; or in-depth reviews employing quantitative and qualitative methods such as surveys, interviews, workshadowing, and process reviews.

Things that may be on your mind about stakeholder engagement

1. Getting budget for stakeholder engagement
This is a common issue relating to stakeholder engagement, as it is often not identified as a priority and consequently can get neglected when resources are limited (as they nearly always are). The goal is to get the budget holders and senior stakeholders to understand that investing in user engagement is as important as investing in the right hardware, software and infrastructure. We can come and talk through the benefits of our work with your budget holders to illustrate the value it will add.
2. Making time and prioritising stakeholder engagement
We would encourage (even beseech!) you to put a little time aside to consider the user (soft) issues early on, as this may well save you considerable expense or disappointment further down the line. If, however, deadlines are preventing you from moving the soft issues forward at this point, when you do get the opportunity to stick your head above water please make sure you put them on the agenda.
3. Why not just mandate use of the new technology?
It depends on the sort of systems you are implementing. If you are replacing a system completely (rather than providing an alternative route to access / input information), then of course your staff will have no option but to use it. This does not mean the system will provide a good user experience, will be efficient to use or that your users will be positive about the change. The system may well be performing at 10% of its potential, but you will not know.

If you are providing another mechanism to access and input information, for example implementing handheld devices, but allowing access to this information via desktop systems and potentially a radio network do not mandate usage early on. In the longer term mandating your staff to use a system may be a requirement. To do this at the early stages of a roll-out can have very negative effects and can slow down the pace of effective user adoption and emergent usage.