Stakeholder Engagement in Preconstruction: Building Success from Day One

Construction stakeholders include any person, group, or organisation involved in or impacted by a construction project. To deliver successful outcomes, project teams must proactively manage these relationships from the preconstruction phase, well before active building work begins on site. Teams that establish comprehensive stakeholder engagement plans from the outset navigate the entire construction lifecycle more smoothly and efficiently.

Planning Effective Stakeholder Management

Construction projects involve diverse stakeholders across multiple workstreams, including clients, project managers, consultants, and local communities. In commercial fit-out projects, stakeholders also extend to operational teams such as facilities management and IT departments, who will work within the completed building. Therefore, project teams must document formal plans for including all workstreams in project activities and communications.

Effective stakeholder management requires a structured approach:

1. Create an Organisational Chart

   This establishes a clear governance structure. The chart details required decisions and assigns responsibility for each decision, creating a hierarchy that helps teams identify key individuals for specific approvals and decisions.

2. Document and Communicate the Structure

   This formal communication to everyone involved eliminates any ambiguity about decision-making participation that affects ongoing site work and feeds into the project execution plan (PEP).

3. Conduct Stakeholder Meetings

   Meetings with different groups to ensure all parties understand their roles and responsibilities. These meetings typically involve the client's team, local community representatives, consultants, and subcontractors.

Identifying Hidden Stakeholders

Sometimes stakeholders remain invisible until teams hold meetings with client-side representatives. The industry refers to these as 'hidden stakeholders'. Commercial projects, such as office developments, often include catering specialists as hidden stakeholders. Catering teams maintain very specific requirements for prep kitchens, and without clear understanding of their needs, unforeseen issues arise.

When construction teams make assumptions about floor plans or facilities in prep kitchens that don't align with specialist requirements, costly redesigns result. These redesigns consume additional time and money due to delays, typically impacting the programme and potentially resulting in financial penalties.

Managing Competing Stakeholder Priorities

Projects frequently generate competing priorities among stakeholders, as different roles pursue varying objectives. For instance, sustainability consultants and client-side cost teams may clash without clear understanding and negotiation. Each team focuses on its own expectations and objectives, but the overall project manager or client-side lead must determine which decisions take priority.

Ultimately, all decisions return to the governance structure when determining which voices contribute to final outcomes. When stakeholders engage in a 'tug of war', project managers can achieve mutual understanding by providing different options for outcomes. Additionally, explaining the pros and cons of different solutions clearly and simply, while offering hybrid solutions that satisfy all parties through strategic trade-offs, often leads to agreements that consider everyone's ideas.

Using Technology for Stakeholder Communication

Communicating progress and risks forms a central aspect of stakeholder management. However, the diverse mix of roles and individuals almost always creates wide variations in technical understanding levels.

Visual tools effectively bridge this gap by communicating project status in easily understandable formats:

• Progress Versus Programme Tools

  Those showing the critical path are particularly important. Teams should highlight activities that run parallel with float buffers and don't affect the end date, as delays to these typically don't create problems.

• Critical-Path Focus

  This ensures stakeholders understand that delays to these items will change the end date due to knock-on effects throughout the programme.

• Bar Charts and Software Tools

  This allows teams to demonstrate master programme status and progress percentages simply, making communication much easier than providing technical details about all completed and upcoming work.

• Digital Communication Platforms

  Platforms, including snagging applications and video tools, further simplify stakeholder engagement.

Embracing Digital Stakeholders

As the construction industry undergoes significant digital transformation, a new stakeholder type will enter governance structures. Digital teams or digital strategy stakeholders will require invitations to preconstruction project decisions.

Setting digital goals from project inception will become essential, whether for gathering information, operations, maintenance, or capital allowance purposes. These stakeholders will inform strategies for digital information management and communication, as well as digital twins and building information modelling (BIM). Similarly, maintaining centralised models and ensuring information sharing between stakeholders such as consultants and contractors will become increasingly important as digital technology advances in construction processes.

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