Stakeholder engagement, communications or knowledge on working abroad – who cares?

The People SIGs output in recent months has been based on the excellent work of the Stakeholder Engagement Focus Group (SEFG).

After publishing their many webpages, the group needed some feedback on the content and navigation from APM members and other users.

On Thursday 16 November the People SIG held an afternoon workshop in London, with the aim of bringing people together to share their good and bad practice knowledge and help to shape improvements for the future to assist others.

The afternoon had three parallel workshop streams, where the 29 attendees provided much of the content from their own knowledge.

1) Communication

The workstream looked at the topic Communication in Projects.

- How could you set SMART objectives for your communications?
- What should people do because of your communication?
- What channels of communications are there - what works and why?
- What should a communication plan look like?
- How could you measure and evaluate the effectiveness of your communications?

The communication stream had slides to support their discussion.

2) Stakeholder Engagement

The workstream looked at refining and examining the existing SEFG website content.

- Explored and gave feedback on the stakeholder engagement resources on the APM website.
- Proposed the direction for further development and research.
- Networked and shared stakeholder-related experiences and good practices.

The Stakeholder Engagement stream was an interactive review on their current resources.

3) Working Abroad

The workstream looked at the people issues related to International Working.

- Explored and shared what would be useful knowledge before going to work abroad.
- Discussed the content for and then created a revised template for information gathering.
- Discussed and determined the most appropriate methods of output e.g. print, Social Media etc.

The Working Abroad stream was an interactive discussion.

The SEFG have already implemented many of their findings from the workshop, and the Communication workstream and International workstream are taking their actions in the next financial year.

Andrew Bell
APM People SIG Chair