Stakeholder Management is a Front-End Risk Elimination
January 09, 2026
In mining and metals projects, most risks are not technical. Instead, they are alignment risks discovered too late.
Yet, in many organisations I have worked for, they still treat stakeholder management as a soft activity — something to be handled alongside engineering, rather than before it. Evidence from major mining projects shows the opposite: early stakeholder engagement and aligment is one of the strongest predictors of cost, schedule, and value certainty.
According to the Project Management Institute (PMI), stakeholder management is a structured discipline:
In theory, this should prevent late surprises. In practice, alignment is often delayed — and replaced by a simple spreadsheet and engineering effort that looks like progress but avoids hard decisions.
Empirical benchmarking by Independent Project Analysis (IPA) consistently shows:
⚠️ Decisions made before ~15% of project spend lock in ~80% of lifecycle cost
⚠️ Misalignment discovered after FEL 2 drives:
Stakeholder issues rarely disappear — they simply resurface as “engineering changes”.
In mining projects, social licence, Traditional Owners, and environmental regulators are often treated as external constraints rather than core design inputs.
When these stakeholders are engaged late, risks materialise as:
High-performing projects integrate community and environmental requirements early, treating them as front-end risk elimination, not downstream compliance.
One of the most common failure points in mining projects is late Operations involvement. When Operations is treated as a reviewer or commissioning stakeholder, the outcome is predictable:
The best projects I've worked on, treat Operations as a co-owner of the design from FEL 1. But it is rare rather than normal practice.
Because engineering:
Stakeholder alignment, by contrast:
So organisations default to what feels safe — even when it isn’t.
IPA describes this pattern bluntly:
Engineering is often used as a substitute for decision-making.
Successful mining and metals projects don’t reduce engineering effort — they move alignment upstream.
Effective steering committees: ✔️ Own stakeholder alignment ✔️ Resolve value vs cost vs risk trade-offs early (VIP)s) ✔️ Prevent re-litigation of settled decisions ✔️ Focus on decisions, not presentations
Engineering locks value in. Stakeholder alignment decides whether that value exists.
The best mining projects I've worked on, don’t start with better flowsheets or layouts — they start with early engagement, better decisions made earlier, by the right people. Because Stakeholder Management is an efective way of Front-End Risk Elimination!
