📤 The outcome of this Plan of Work card is to agree project strategic outcomes with decision-makers

✅ Make sure the definition of outcomes and requirements includes the appropriate stakeholders and decision-makers. There is a need to build confidence in councillors and strategic directors that the project can fulfil their aims effectively.

Stakeholder mapping and engagement

Stakeholders are people or organisations that are internal or external to the project who have a vested interest in its success. That interest can have a positive or negative impact on the project execution. Therefore, it’s crucial to know your stakeholders. More than just being able to identify who the stakeholders are in the project, you need to talk to them and manage what contribution they make. It’s an important task and the success of the project will depend on it.

There are a number of ways to map out the project stakeholders. The following is derived from guidance from the Project Management Institute (Smith, 2000).

Stakeholders

A stakeholder is a person or group who has some interest or level of influence that can impact the project. A project benefits not only from understanding their interests, but also from understanding the potential project impact if a need were not met.

The first effort should be a brainstorming activity with appropriately selected members and an optional facilitator. All stakeholders should be initially considered with the option to exclude them from later stages of the analysis. It is often difficult to force classifications into groups and determine who is considered truly inside and outside the project context. To gain a more powerful understanding of needs and expectations, it is usually helpful to identify these stakeholders by name rather than by generic terms such as customer, owner or sponsor.

Identify stakeholders’ interests, impact level and relative priority

In refining the previous stage, the stakeholders should be listed in a table or spreadsheet with their key interests, potential level of impact to the project and priority in relation to other stakeholders. We want to be careful to outline multiple interests, particularly those that are overt and hidden in relation to project objectives.

The key is to keep in mind that identifying interests is done with the stakeholders’ perspectives in mind. This is difficult since interests are usually hidden and contradict openly stated aims. Each interest should be related to the appropriate project phase; that is, interests change as the project moves through its lifecycle. With some stakeholders it may be crucial to extract interests by formally asking them questions such as:

• What are your expectations of this project?
• How does the successful completion of the project benefit you?
• Are there any stakeholders that may conflict with your interest?
• Which stakeholders do you believe are in conflict with your interests?

Once the major interests are identified, it is also useful to outline how the project will be impacted if these are met or not met. In most cases, a simple annotation of positive , negative , or unknown can be used as well as high (H), medium (M), low (L) or uncertain .

A powerful way of visualising this is to categorise stakeholders along 2 axes: influence and interest. There are other approaches that work, and local authorities should use the method or categorisation that their organisation is most familiar with.

Define the requirements, following initial consultation with internal project stakeholders

Once the primary stakeholders and decision-makers have been identified, the project team need to work with them to align strategic interests around the project in an effective and efficient way.

Decision-making support was highlighted as part of Net Zero Go: insights for local authority transformation of the UK energy system to meet carbon reduction targets.

One of the output tools for the toolkit is the Decision Making Doughnut, which will complement local authority decision-making and stakeholder processes by:

• providing a visual summary of the impact of a given project

• enforcing consideration of areas that may not have been previously considered, such as the impact of decisions/projects on the wider environment

• quantifying the impact of a given project on a relative scale, which allows decision-makers to observe impacts at a glance

• embedding environmental/carbon thinking for non-energy-specific projects

While this decision-making tool could be used at any stage during the lifecycle of a local authority’s projects or processes, it is recommended to use it primarily within Stage 0: strategic definition. This is because communicating the impacts of a given project earlier allows them to be understood by interested stakeholders, therefore reducing the risk of progress being blocked further down the process.

Develop high-level, measurable, ambitious and unambiguous project outcomes to define the requirements, following initial consultation with internal project stakeholders

Defining the outcomes can be done using the Net Zero Go benefits framework to work through potential results. These should be derived from the agreed strategic aims and approved if possible by the primary stakeholders.

Skills and capability required

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