For any project to succeed, it is imperative to have the right planning. But what is also important is to have the right tools for the execution of the planning – in the absence of right tools even the best of the plans may fail. An important aspect which should always be considered is stakeholder engagement and management. Utilising a stakeholder management system reduces the administration and tracking headaches.
There are many stakeholder management systems on the market and comparing them can become confusing. The points set out below are designed to assist you in the decision making on finding the online stakeholder engagement platforms for your requirements:
- Identify your goals and the stakeholders you need to engage
First things first: you need to understand who you are engaging with and how much engagement your stakeholders require. It is important that objectives and the level of influence they will have are well articulated within your planning. In this instance you should be looking at a stakeholder management system which including stakeholder engagement functionality.
- Capability vs Ease of Use
Over complicated tools can reduce ease of user for your project administrators which can lead to abandonment of using the tool and/or more administration burden. Consider a tool which is well designed to make it easier for your entire project team to learn.
- Compatibility with other systems
Your organization may be using several other systems for overall corporate management. Think about information you may need to import/export between different systems.
- Technical support from the vendor
No matter how easy your stakeholder engagement software is, you would still require vendor support. Ask the vendor questions about the setup and startup support that he would offer, long-term technical assistance, ongoing development, etc.
Also, compare the different vendors on the basis of quality of the documentation about their services.
- Security and Encryption
A lot many times, stakeholder engagement involves transferring of sensitive files and documents and so, the software should be such that it keeps the data encrypted while offering the best data security. In fact, data security should be an important consideration for selecting the online engagement software.
We hope these points will help you make the right decision about stakeholder engagement software if you are confused among various choices. In case, you have not come across any good engagement software, try Engagement Hub. Ours is one of the most preferred and secure online engagement platform that offers great features to assist stakeholder communication. To find out more about our platform, visit the Features section above.
