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Collaboration
Collaboration is a relative important issue to address in the public value plan since a wide range of stakeholders will be involved in implementing the strategic and tactical plan. The challenge lies in the fact that each stakeholder has their own interests and many of them have never worked together with one another before. An additional challenge is that involvement in the value plan is for many stakeholders secondary to their already busy lives and primary tasks (e.g. think of SME’s). Hence, more than in a corporate environment, attention needs to be paid to project management, maintaining a shared vision, and building trust among both primary and secondary stakeholders.
Project management
The implementation plan needs a clear timeline of tasks, milestones and buffers for the upcoming 1 to 3 years. Using a Gantt-chart is a good starting point here. This way all stakeholders have a clear idea of what needs to be done, who is involved and how much progress is being made since the start of the project.
Maintaining a shared vision
When executing the value plan, likely many months and years will go by since the initial (step 1) and final development (step 3) of the strategic vision. Hence, the managers of the public value project should, at designated times, remind participants of ‘why’ they are involved in the project, solve diverging visions, and make clear what parts of the vision have been materialized so far, to keep morale high and make sure everybody is still on the same page. Good communication channels for this can be newsletters, a project website, social media accounts, meetings and celebrative events.
Building trust
Initial trust among the main stakeholders is likely established during the development of the first 4 steps of the value plan, through meetings, interviews and online communication (e.g. emails and newsletters). Maintaining trust during the implementation of the plan can likely be done with the help of project management and reminding participants of the shared vision.
However, the actual development of products is also dependent on the inclusion of secondary stakeholders (e.g. event organizers, construction companies, architects, branding agencies, legal firms). First, an overview of secondary stakeholders needs to be drawn up. In the process, this could reveal additional bottlenecks, which could erode momentum and trust (e.g. a lack of event organizers in a particular area) and need to be solved as soon as possible. Second, ideally you’ll want to stimulate involvement (and trust) among these secondary stakeholders as well. Here you could leverage some of the existing communication channels for the primary set of stakeholders (newsletters, public relations, a website, social media accounts, meetings and celebrative events).