Finalising your approach
Sign-off and ownership: clients and stakeholders

A project with a community engagement element or focus is likely to cut across conventional organisational departments, and be of interest to a wide range of internal and external stakeholders. This both enhances its potential impact and presents a challenge for the project team. The team needs to ensure that a number of different clients or stakeholders remain 'on-board'.

Internal clients may include:

the individual/ department who commissioned the project;
individuals/ departments who 'signed off' the project - and may have added new requirements/ re-shaped its scope;
the line manager of the project manager/ project team members, who may be fully supportive or may need convincing that this initiative is worthwhile, or may act as the champion

The project team is likely to have to report to one or more of these 'clients' during and at the end of the project. It is therefore important to know what their expectations are both of the project, and of how they are to be kept informed of progress. Where there are conflicting or unclear expectations, you may want to ask the project champion, or a more senior colleague (such as your line manager) to clarify matters for the team.

Internal stakeholders may include:

colleagues with an interest in the project, but no direct involvement;
managers of other teams looking for new ways of working/ who need to tackle issues similar to those addressed by the project;
departments with responsibility for areas of work such as policy development; corporate and strategic direction; communications and marketing; community engagement/ neighbourhood policing/ citizen focus; consultation; and performance monitoring.

While you may have no direct responsibility for keeping these people informed, you may want to discuss with the Force/ Authority communications team and your 'clients', what their views are on this. There are likely to be substantial benefits in keeping as many people in the Force/ Authority informed about the work that is going on.

External clients may include:

organisations/ departments who either jointly commissioned the project with the Force/ Authority or who were subsequently invited to work on the project.

If members of your project team are employed by partner agencies, it is likely that they will have the primary responsibility for updating the relevant people in their organisation. If this is the case, it is important to ensure they have sign-off from their organisation, and that the information being disseminated to every organisation involved in the project is full, consistent, and timely. Multi-agency projects often succeed or fail on the frequency and quality of communication within and between all levels of the organisations involved.

External stakeholders may include:

communities
partner organisations/ partnerships
media organisations
local MPs/ councillors
Government Office
Home Office
Voluntary and community sector groups

It is often a good idea to manage these groups in the same way as the internal stakeholders.

Managing expectations and meeting information needs

You need to be careful to manage the expectations and respond to the information needs of all your external stakeholders.

For all clients and stakeholders, you need to: