Lots of people talk about stakeholder engagement. Some people recognize how important it is. Fewer actually know how to create and manage an effective stakeholder engagement process. You’ll need support and capacity from across the business, so take the time to plan out the who/when/how for the teams you’ll want to partner with to build and implement your plan. Pay special attention to any concerns or issues raised by stakeholders when scoping as you’ll want to make sure you address those during your process.

Bringing all of your stakeholders along during plan development will be challenging and time consuming but worth every moment when it comes to implementation. Be sure to build a practical timeline for this initiative - and then add 20%. (^-^) It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: Make sure you set clear expectations for the nature and extent of their involvement in the process and transition, and be sure to structure your group meetings so that you maximize their value. Those meetings should be focused on decision-making, not updates or share-outs. Do those asynchronously via a project wiki, emails, etc. and do individual connects as necessary.  

Your sustainability data exists within a complex system in your organization and relies on input from other complex external systems. Take care to clearly identify and determine how you will deal with interdependencies - this should inform the order in which you implement projects, your timeline, resource and capacity allocation, operational expenses, and other factors. For example, you’ll need to harvest data from your financial systems for purposes of estimating annual carbon emissions. Your finance team likely relies on an existing platform (e.g. SAP), with data inputs from a wide variety of sources. Understanding the finance team’s data collection and analysis processes & timeline, as well as interoperability needs for their software or platforms will directly impact your data management plan.

First off, don’t rush out and sign a licensing agreement for one of the seemingly thousands of sustainability, ESG, climate, or whatever tools that are out there. In our experience, these tools are too expensive for anyone but larger corporation and they still often require you to collect and clean most of your own data anyway. This is particularly true for many carbon accounting platforms, services, etc. And be particularly wary of anything claiming to use AI to dramatically improve your system. We find that many companies can start off using software they already have - Excel, Smartsheet, SAP, or something else. Partner with your technology team (or whoever is responsible for managing software in your company) to identify, evaluate, and vet potential tools before you commit to something new. They are likely experienced with assessing software and should have key insights about important integrations across the business.

If you’ve done a good job at the stakeholder engagement element of building your plan, you’ll already have a major advantage when it comes time to implement. Not only should a sustainability data management plan be a priority for you, but it also needs to be a relatively high priority for other functions as well - at least during initial implementation and transition periods. To ensure that you’re maintaining support from across the business we recommend that you get your initiative included in the annual plans and roadmaps for other functions, particularly those of whichever team is responsible for managing technology and software at your company. Build it into budget requests and capacity plans. Be sure to highlight how your partners across the organization will benefit from more reliable, higher quality sustainability data. Share regular updates with the business and provide specific examples of how it helps people deliver value.