What are the best practices for communicating change to different stakeholders?

Stakeholder management is a key skill for program managers. In order to provide the best service and products, you have to know who is a partner on your journey. What skill sets do they have? What are their priorities? When do they have to be informed of key decisions? Track all of this information in an official stakeholder registry.

The word "change" has a very broad scope indeed! In any case, we need to identify the stakeholders, however, the communication method or strategy should be tailored according to type of change to be communicated. For example, a strategy change is quite different than a small change in a product or process! Additionally, for a specific change, among stakeholders, customers, suppliers, society, etc.. all have different perspectives and the method of communication should be carefully addressed by taking into account this diversity.

The biggest lightbulb for anyone that is executing change, whether it be an individual buying a company or implementing new procedures or tools, is recognizing the hack of successful change is ensuring that your team members feel like they're a part of the change - one better is that they're DRIVING the change. If your workforce feels like the change is happening TO them, it triggers a security alarm for them which in turn creates flight risk. If your teams feel like their opinions matter and they get to drive change - it's invigorating. Also remember that the stakeholders often know EXACTLY what needs to be done so involving them is also the path of least resistance.

Involving stakeholders is essential and it doesn’t just mean tell people what you are doing. Involving them in the early stages of the change engages them, they feel valued and they are more likely to become advocates of the change if they se an element of their contribution in it! Without the involvement they are more likely to, after time, resort to the old ways they are comfortable with. I learned that the hard way when, as a first time change manager back in the early 2000’s I assembled the team and identified what we were going to do and how we were going to do it. I crashed and burned on that one but learned a valuable lesson!

People are more likely to accept change if you give them support. That's human nature. No one wants to be alone on an island.

As a young project manager freshly assigned to a failing project I was tasked with turning it around. The first two weeks I did nothing, I sat with each team member, listened and observed, how information flowed in and how it flowed out. I then constructed an end to end process map of what I think they did and how they did. I took everyone off site and put the process on the wall and asked them to rip it apart, find the holes and help me rebuild it. That was the engagement piece, at the end we had a process that was repeatable and scalable, I knew the manpower requirements, the time taken to execute and the costs. The change was easy from then on we implemented it the next day the team was buzzing as we secured an additional 9 projects!