Why bother with stakeholders during the need assessment?

“We would never have known about…” is a common response when trainers that design programs are asked what they learned from their stakeholders during planning. Regardless of how well educators think they know their audience, listening to stakeholders is an important task during the planning and needs assessment stage.

In one program, the overlooked stakeholder was the office director. That program ran into real problems when the offi ce director revealed concerns over the focus of the program. In another example, the educator forgot to ask the teachers the program had planned to train how or if the topic might fi t into the science standards of that grade level. Needless to say, trainers weren’t as excited about the program as the planner thought they’d be!

Stakeholder involvement in planning can vary greatly. In some cases, a whole group of stakeholder representatives might be brought together to talk with the trainers-planners. In most situations, however, individual stakeholders are called on the phone or spoken to in casual conversation about the pending program in order to get their informal feedback.

And what are stakeholders asked? Some are asked questions as simple as, “What do you think about this idea?” For major projects, however, stakeholder input is much more vital and therefore more formalized. The bottom line is, as one educator put it, “We’d have made a lot more mistakes if we hadn’t talked with the people who have a reason to care about the program.”

What’s your experience with stakeholders’ involvement in educational projects?