What do you do if your key stakeholders in process automation are not engaged?

A few years ago, we experienced stakeholder disengagement in our projects. Once initiated, stakeholders would then become disengaged and not show up for key meetings, making the initiative the project team's problem. We did 3 things to resolve this: (1) Required business stakeholders to provide business cases for all projects, with clear benefits (2) Assigned benefits tracking and reporting responsibility to project sponsor ensuring full support for project success at the business unit level. (3) Linking Employee KPI metrics to projects helped to ensure alignment on project objectives with business objectives. These changed helped to improve stakeholder engagement across the board.

When stakeholders are not actively engaging with process automation, several reasons could be at play: 1. Lack of clarity regarding the organization's vision and priorities. 2. Limited awareness of the potential impact of process automation. 3. Budget constraints hindering investment in automation initiatives. However, this lack of engagement poses several potential risks and challenges: 1. Gaps in understanding requirements, leading to suboptimal solutions. 2. Misalignment of objectives between automation efforts and organizational goals. 3. Resistance to change among stakeholders, impeding the adoption of automation. 4. Inefficient implementations due to a lack of stakeholder input and guidance.

In my experience, it is essential to identify the underlying causes and effectively communicate the value of the initiative to them. This could involve conducting stakeholder analysis to understand their interests, concerns, and priorities better. Once you have identified the reasons for disengagement, tailor your communication strategies to address their specific needs and highlight the benefits of process automation for their roles and the organization as a whole.

Addressing these challenges requires proactive efforts to educate stakeholders, align automation initiatives with organizational objectives, and foster a culture of collaboration and support for process automation.

Often, if key stakeholders are not involved in process automation, it is due to inadequate or incorrect communication of the benefits of automation and misalignment of expectations. In this case, it is important to properly engage key stakeholders by communicating the value of automated processes, focusing primarily on themes such as ROI, increased productivity, error reduction, leveraging the quantitative benefits of the automated process. Organizing ad hoc meetings to engage stakeholders by presenting the automation strategy and involving vendor representatives could be advantageous in some cases.

Assessing the needs is a crucial part of a successful project, interviewing the people currently performing the job as well as interested parties. By identifying the gaps on existing operations you’ll be able to find pain points to address with your proposal. Emphasize the business benefits. The buy in will always be better if the decision makers understand how it will help them achieve business goals.

When stakeholders realign their goals, it fosters a sense of unity and purpose, ultimately leading to increased engagement. As each stakeholder's objectives become more closely intertwined, they begin to see themselves as part of a collective effort rather than pursuing individual agendas. This shared vision creates a fertile ground for collaboration and commitment. When stakeholders perceive their interests as aligned with the broader goals of the project or organization, they are more likely to actively participate, contribute ideas, and invest their time and energy. Moreover, this alignment promotes transparency and trust, essential ingredients for sustained engagement.

Continuously engage with your stakeholders throughout the process automation journey. Solicit feedback, gather insights, and adapt your approach based on their input. By maintaining open lines of communication and actively involving stakeholders, you can ensure their ongoing engagement and support for process automation initiatives.

We must review: 1. Validate if there were no participants in the construction of the ASIS (End to End) value flow, a meeting must be generated to see the built value flow, have their feedback, and share it with all those involved, for the approval of the built. 2. Validate if we had any errors in the classification of the influence and interest matrix of the parties. 3. Review and/or generate the personalized communication plan, according to the classification of the influence matrix, it is important to keep in mind that we must always manage expectations, generate trust, minimize risks in the project and promote synergies, this achieves that everyone feels part of the project that their fears and/or concerns are taken into account.