For built environment professionals, delivering socially impactful projects is more crucial and challenging than ever. This step-by-step guide provides an innovative approach to stakeholder engagement, empowering project teams to create meaningful social value through the stakeholder engagement process and build better projects.
Socially Successful Projects in the built environment will help the reader understand the theory behind a reframed approach to stakeholder engagement using a social value lens. The authors argue that projects in the built environment need to be technically feasible, financially viable, and socially successful. Project managers need to focus on all three elements, which are summarised as 'concrete, cash, and connection'. Failing to meet that third criterion can lead to pushback, protests, delays, and potentially unsuccessful projects. This book focuses on the third of those elements (the social dimension) and provides a step-by-step guide to how a project can be socially successful. In summary, this is about delivering better projects for both the stakeholders and the project teams.
In Socially Successful Projects in the built environment, the authors unravel the complex relationship between social value and stakeholder engagement and reveal a transformative practical theory for effective collaboration and facilitation. Along the way, they address key issues such as design philosophy, scenario development, stakeholder analysis, optioneering, and project learning, and provide practical advice on how to use these methods within real-world projects. This book is essential reading for all built environment stakeholders and teams working to deliver better projects.
Sarah Fitton is the Founder and Director of Aurora Engagements Ltd, a built environment consultancy. Sarah has over 17 years of experience working in industry in a large built environment consultancy before setting up her own firm. She also has over 13 years of experience working in academia within the fields of social value and stakeholder engagement. She graduated from Cambridge University in 2015 with a PhD examining the social value of infrastructure and continues to conduct research in this field, with five peer-reviewed journal articles and a white paper published to date and one currently under review. She is a founding member of 'Patn*' - a Manchester-based community dedicated to shaping modern culture through placemaking - and a member of the Environment Agency's Stakeholder Engagement and Communications Community of Practice (SECCOP).
Simon Wilson is the Director and co-Founder of Wilson Sherriff, a consultancy providing stakeholder engagement and facilitation expertise to clients in a range of sectors, including the built environment. Simon has over 20 years of experience working in industry with a range of clients and projects. Since 2010 much of his work has focused on projects with an environmental focus such as flood defences and water treatment sites. Simon holds an MBA degree from the Open University and is an accredited Certified Professional Facilitator (Master). He chairs the Member Council of the Organisation for Responsible Businesses.
