Working With Others

When planning and designing technology-rich learning spaces you should talk with as many stakeholder groups as possible and, more importantly, listen to what they have to say. Your list of stakeholders could be very long and so you need to take time to identify suitable people. Some people need to be involved from the earliest ideas stage whereas others will have more to contribute once you have some proposal on which they can comment. We have some resources that may help you in this process.

Useful Resources

Managing Stakeholder Relationships

Stakeholder Analysis Template

Creating An MLE:
Who Should Be Involved?
Gathering Requirements: Stakeholders

Adverse Stakeholders

The Roundtable Approach

Influencing Others

• Groups to involve are students, staff (of all types), those in the community that the institution works with, non-executives of the institution on the governing body, and indeed anyone who shows a keen interest. It's also good to talk with others outside the institution in as wide a range of occupations as possible. We consider the range of people you may need to engage with in Working With Others.
• JISC infoNet has some generic guidance on managing stakeholder relationships and a Stakeholder Analysis Template to help you analyse the likely perceptions of and influence on your project of various groups.
• The applied infoKit on Creating an MLE has some examples of how to go about deciding who should be involved in an MLE project and starting to gather requirements
• Not all of your stakeholders will welcome the changes that your project will bring - there may be some adverse stakeholders and our Risk Management infoKit has some guidance on working with this group
• Involving such a diverse group of people will not be without issues (especially as they will use different vocabularies) and a roundtable approach could be helpful in airing differences in a non-threatening way - we have an example of this approach in the context of implementing a VLE
• You may need to use all of your influence skills to get some stakeholders on board and JISC infoNet has produced some guidance on Influencing Others

You do however need to make it clear to stakeholders that consultation does not mean that all their wants have to be included. Indeed the great danger is that the project becomes an amalgam of disparate ideas with no real focus. That is why it is so important to have a strong, clear vision to guide the project and make sure that flexibility is safeguarded.

That's why projects need strong champions that can use ideas to strengthen and modify the vision and prevent it from being derailed. Talk to everyone but make sure that you use what you hear to build on the vision.