PMO Conference 2021 \\ The PMO’s Guide to Stakeholder Engagification

We’ve moved away from stakeholder management as a concept, and now the practitioner’s focus should be on stakeholder engagement.

This presentation, by Elizabeth Harrin, will look at the differences between management and engagement in a project-led environment, and provide practical tips for “doing” engagement and encouraging participation through game mechanics.

Gamification gets people to take action through the techniques and mechanics of games.

We’ll look at the 5 principles of using engagement + gamification that can be used in your Project Office to support stakeholders’ engagement with project work.
1. Track your steps
2. Take small actions
3. Create feedback loops
4. Keep it simple
5. Make it special

These principles encourage participation and make it easy and fun for people to want to work with us.

The PMO’s Guide to Stakeholder Engagification – Elizabeth Harrin

Session Notes

The PMO needs to strengthen engagement with various stakeholders in the business and there are lots of practical ways of doing that in this session.

I liked the idea that Elizabeth shared about having a buddy. In her PMO, each member had a buddy elsewhere in the business. So she had one in the clinical team, someone else had one with someone in finance etc. It’s such a simple idea which led to stronger links with stakeholders in other parts of the business. This was related to the part of gamificiation about feedback.

I also liked the simple idea of using voting in emails – great if you just need a quick understanding of where things are at from a large group of people. It’s part of Outlook so why not try it out.

There was also a reminder about how easy is it for people to get in touch with the PMO – again, simple idea when it comes to stakeholder engagement – can they get in touch with the PMO through different means?

Gamification is not about collecting badges and points on leaderboards – no-one has time for that in a busy project. It’s about how we can up the engagement levels and crucially get people to take action.

If we can engage with simple, shorter messages with a quick voting tool to gauge interest or a yes/no – we can be getting the information we need without demanding too much time of people.

Finally, another example which stood out, was gaining responses in a templated way. It’s like when you’re completing a survey, it’s easier to manage the tick and checkbox answers than it is the free text. We can utilise that idea in the PMO, especially when it comes to numbers, RAG status, simple yes and no situations.

Elizabeth also put together a PDF which more notes and resources, you can access that here.