Stakeholder Engagement case: the Green Casting Life project

Over time, the role of stakeholders has changed. This consideration can be verified by observing how, in the PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge), the presence and relevance of stakeholder engagement have evolved across the years, from simply collecting the applicable communication techniques to a complete description of the methodologies needed to ensure the complete involvement of stakeholders in each step of the project based on their relevance. In the seventh and last edition of PMBOK, “stakeholder engagement” is defined as a set of six tasks (“identify”, “understand”, “analyse”, “prioritize”, “engage” and “monitor”) that start at the beginning of the project and last for its whole duration. All these activities are carried out with the intent of maximising the efficacy of the engagement, which is considered one of the keys to the success of the project. The presented paper analyses a real-life case, the Green Casting LIFE Project. This project aims to evaluate the use of inorganic binders to reduce the environmental impact of ferrous foundries. In this context, stakeholder engagement is applied to guarantee the correct engagement of the external stakeholders, which generally have a significant influence on the activity of foundries. In detail, the work describes the steps of stakeholder engagement and their application in the project, focusing on the description of stakeholder mapping, intended as a series of different techniques used to classify the stakeholders in order to prioritise their relevance. After that, the communication strategy adopted to ensure the correct engagement of each stakeholder is presented.