What Non-Project Managers Need to Know
Capital project stakeholder management is the work of identifying everyone affected by a project, agreeing what each of them needs to know and when, and keeping those lines open from mobilisation through to handover.
If you have found yourself coordinating between senior leadership and a project team, without ‘project manager’ anywhere in your job title, this is the part of delivery that will take most of your attention. It is also the part that causes the most avoidable problems. This piece is a companion to our September pillar on capital project delivery in live environments, and it focuses on managing people rather than buildings.
If you have a project starting in an occupied building and want to talk through how the communication side should be set up, see how we deliver capital projects or talk to our team. We are happy to walk through an approach before anything is committed.
IN OUR EXPERIENCE
We’ll say it plainly, because our project experience makes it unavoidable: the difference between a smooth project and a fraught one is almost always communication. Not engineering, not budget, communication. Get the people side right and the technical side has room to succeed.
Start with a capital project stakeholder map
You cannot communicate well with people you have not identified. Map them, then work out, for each, what they need to know, when they need to know it, and how they want to hear it. Distinguish internal stakeholders from external ones; they have different needs and different sensitivities.
Who are the stakeholders on a capital project?
On a typical project the stakeholders include the customer’s project manager, the professional consultants and advisers appointed to the scheme, the building users themselves, and specialist roles such as laboratory or facility managers. On a live project the maintenance and FM team belong on that list from day one, not from handover. Different stakeholders matter at different points, which is easier to plan against once you can see where a project sits in the RIBA stages.
Build a communications plan people actually use
A communications plan that lives in a folder is worthless. A good one is simple enough to follow under pressure: regular touchpoints, clear ownership of each message, and an agreed route for getting decisions made quickly. Manage expectations at every stage, and when something goes wrong, say so honestly and early, bad news travels better early and small than late and large.
Reporting is part of this, not separate from it. Where progress, cost, risk and change are visible in one place, people stop chasing updates and start acting on them.
IN OUR EXPERIENCE
A communications plan holds together better when one person owns it. On projects in occupied buildings, or where works touch several sites or departments, we nominate a stakeholder liaison manager: a single named contact who handles communication between our team and the customer, so building users, the estates team and the project team are all working from the same information at the same time.
Escalation and governance on capital projects
Know your escalation routes before you need them. When the line between roles blurs, decisions stall and accountability scatters.
What is the difference between a project sponsor and a project manager?
The project sponsor owns the business case and the decisions that change it: scope, budget, and whether the project still makes sense. The project manager runs delivery against that agreed scope and budget. The sponsor decides whether to spend more; the project manager decides how to spend what has been agreed. Keeping the two separate is what stops a project drifting without anyone noticing. The contract you are working under also shapes who decides what, which follows from the procurement route chosen at the outset.
Governance also runs through a single accountable team rather than a chain of handoffs between separate contractors, which is where responsibility usually goes missing.
Capital project stakeholder management in practice
On the UCL Biological Science Units project, delivery meant coordinating over 40 individuals in a live environment. That is a stakeholder management exercise at least as much as a construction one, and it is the scale at which informal communication stops working.
IN OUR EXPERIENCE
Good stakeholder communication is what let us deliver complex live electrical swap-overs at Queen Mary, UCL and Cambridge research facilities without disruption. The failures are just as instructive, and almost always preventable: being locked out of work areas because of permit and key problems; deliveries arriving when graduation or festival dates had not been shared; and, a recurring one, poor attendance at pre-start meetings, which leaves the whole team short of knowledge for the project’s entire duration. Treat the pre-start meeting as non-negotiable; it pays back many times over.
The UCL Biological Science Units project involved coordinating over 40 individuals in a live environment. It is written up in our project case studies. Comparable coordination applies across research and laboratory environments generally, where specialist roles sit alongside the estates team.
Why capital project stakeholder management is the real work
Stakeholder management is not an optional extra layered on top of ‘real’ project work. In a live environment it is the real project work. Map the people, plan the communication, keep governance clear, and protect the meetings and routines that keep everyone informed.
See how engagement and communication sit at the centre of how we deliver or talk to our team.
