2. Stakeholder engagement and communication
Strategic stakeholder engagement and clear communication are critical to successful change, especially in complex environments with multiple stakeholder groups.
The SRO plays a key role in building trust within the delivery team and across stakeholders. When the SRO actively supports engagement, sets clear expectations and encourages open dialogue, it helps create trust, alignment and shared ownership.
Projects can lose momentum when stakeholder engagement is reactive, fragmented or treated as a secondary task. This is especially true in complex environments involving cross-agency coordination or public-facing impacts. Without consistent messaging, meaningful consultation and visible leadership, confidence can drop, resistance can grow and support for project objectives can weaken. Tailored engagement strategies that reflect stakeholder needs and priorities help build support and reduce resistance.
Key lessons
Trusted stakeholder relationships
Strong stakeholder relationships contribute to the success of large transformation programs. They help build trust and a shared understanding of goals so solutions meet business and user needs. Strong relationships also help progress approvals more smoothly and build support for the project when needed.
Related actionable insights:
1 - Build stakeholder relationships early | 2 - Maintain a consistent narrative | 5 - Tailor messaging to audience
Stakeholder coordination
Projects with complex stakeholder engagement needs, especially across multiple agencies and industry, require strong coordination. Stakeholder priorities, roles and engagement responsibilities need to be clearly defined and shared across teams to help prevent misalignment and information silos.
Real life learning
The project operated in a large and complex stakeholder environment, and extensive engagement across the agency and beyond was required. This included legal, procurement, digital, security, research and communications teams, as well as other government agencies, industry and external stakeholders.
While this collaboration supported delivery, it placed a significant coordination burden on the project team, particularly alongside managing multiple adviser contracts. This experience highlighted that effective stakeholder engagement often requires substantial additional effort that must be planned for upfront. Clear, cross-divisional engagement priorities needed to be communicated at the executive and governance levels and included in divisional business plans.
This would help cascade responsibilities to teams and support accountability at all levels, enabling divisions to proactively allocate resources, rather than relying on project teams to coordinate them.
"Being able to understand if we're going to leverage or tap into existing change or communications resourcing across the agency, that when we ask for that work to be happening, it's got to be prioritised. It's got to be planned."
Related actionable insights:
1 - Build stakeholder relationships early | 2 - Maintain a consistent narrative | 3 - Involve stakeholders in requirements | 4 - Standardise and simplify communication
User co-design
Genuine co-design and consultation improved outcomes. Early identification of the right stakeholders helped them contribute meaningfully to design. Early and ongoing engagement helped prevent rework and reduce unplanned work. Allowing enough time for staff and user consultation, and tailoring stakeholder engagement throughout delivery was essential.
Real life learning
A pilot project aimed to improve the transparency and consistency of corporate reporting required extensive industry stakeholder engagement. The project undertook substantial co-design, public consultation, and engagement before, during and after the pilot.
This was well received by participants and helped refine and promote the project’s value proposition and benefits as the project progressed. However, the team found that insufficient time had been allocated for the public consultation and review process, which affected delivery timelines.
This level of meaningful engagement delivered clear value to the pilot, but it needed to be properly planned and resourced from the start, including appropriate contingencies.
Related actionable insights:
1 - Build stakeholder relationships early | 2 - Maintain a consistent narrative | 5 - Tailor messaging to audience
Practical collaboration
The value of practical measures that make collaboration and relationship building easier was often underestimated. These include co-locating business and project teams, using communication tools and functionality well, and prioritising face-to-face engagement with key stakeholders to resolve issues and gather feedback
Real life learning
The project team, which was working with a complex and broadly distributed stakeholder group, operated largely in a virtual environment during the early stages of delivery. While this enabled continuity of work, it created challenges for high-stakes activities, such as evaluation processes and sensitive contract negotiations.
In-person engagement with the supplier at that stage would have helped build trust and rapport more quickly and enabled more effective negotiation through difficult issues. This would have also helped establish a stronger foundation for a strategic supplier partnership, setting the project up for success from the outset.
Real life learning
A large, geographically dispersed project team used existing collaborative digital tools to enable real-time communication and coordination. This included determining and adopting rules of use and ways of working, and making full use of the additional functionality available in these applications.
Setting up effective collaboration tools that suited the specific needs of the project from initiation supported faster decision-making, improved visibility across locations and supported more effective day-to-day delivery.
Related actionable insights:
3 - Involve stakeholders in requirements | 4 - Standardise and simplify communication
Actionable insights
Invest in developing strong stakeholder relationships early.
Use targeted and consistent engagement to build trust, align expectations and maintain support throughout delivery.“When a project depends on specialist or external support, everyone involved needs to understand the impact their work has on delivery. Delays can have significant flow-on effects, so accountability should extend beyond individual contributors to the leaders responsible for those teams.”
Practitioner perspective- Develop and maintain a consistent and compelling narrative about program objectives, benefits and scope.
Leaders need to be able to explain the intended outcomes clearly and reinforce them over many years. Communicate early and consistently to build trust and alignment to the overall vision. - Involve stakeholders in developing and reviewing business requirements.
Make sure they understand and agree on the proposed design before build starts. This helps avoid costly rework, reduce misunderstandings and support adoption of the final solution. - Standardise and simplify communication.
Use clear, consistent language and agreed channels to reduce confusion and strengthen stakeholder buy-in. Where possible, ask for an independent review and feedback on clarity of key messages and documents. - Tailor messaging to your audience.
Keep communication targeted, relevant and concise. Use channels and formats that suit each user group and adjust these based on their day-to-day role. - Adopt a citizen-focused mindset.
Focus on how the service is understood and used by the public. Build awareness, encourage engagement and prioritise the smooth adoption of new digital services.