Consultation Process: Step-by-Step Guide

This article walks you through each stage of the consultation process, from setting up the Engagement Plan to generating the consultation report. This article covers consultation-specific steps and links to existing articles for detailed instructions.

This article covers:

• Creating the consultation Engagement Plan
• Recording consultation communications
• Handling multi-stakeholder overrides
• Managing issues raised during consultation
• Tracking commitments
• Generating consultation reports

Create the Consultation Engagement Plan

1. Create an Engagement Plan for the consultation.
2. In the Description field, summarize the consultation objectives.

3. Link the stakeholders you need to engage with. To do so, navigate to Planning → Stakeholders, or link Individuals or Organizations in batch from Stakeholder engagement → Individuals or Stakeholder engagement → Organizations.

   

   

❗︎ Important: Only Individuals and Organizations linked directly to the Engagement Plan appear in the consultation report.

Record Consultation Communications

1. Create the communication or link it to the consultation Engagement Plan. 
2. Set Requires follow-up to Yes when a concern or item needs action.
   ⓘ Note: The Requires follow-up field appears when the communication is linked to a Consultation Engagement Plan.

3. Add all participating stakeholders to the communication.

   

ⓘ Note: Consultation reports include only stakeholders who are linked to both the consultation Engagement Plan and the communication.

★ Tip: When communications are created through Outlook and Teams, participant capture can happen automatically.

Handle Multi-Stakeholder Overrides

When a communication involves multiple stakeholders, use Stakeholder overrides to record each stakeholder's outcome (Requires follow-up, Summary, and linked Issues) without changing the original communication record. For instructions, see Add, Remove, or View Stakeholder Overrides for Consultation Communications.

ⓘ Note: The Stakeholder overrides table only appears when a communication has multiple stakeholders.

Manage Issues Raised During Consultation

1. Open the communication that raised the concern and create the issue directly from it. For more information, see Create, View, Edit, or Delete Issues. 

   

   The stakeholder, communication, Engagement Plan, title, and issue type are captured automatically.

2. For multi-stakeholder communications, make sure the issue is linked to the stakeholder who raised the concern.

3. Click the Assess action and complete the assessment fields (Assessment date, Assessment of merits, Assessment comments) and the analysis fields (Measure adopted, Official response).

   Note: Use the Reassess action to update the assessment and analysis if the response evolves before closure.

4. When the issue is ready to close, select a Resolution type, add Resolution comments, and record Stakeholder satisfaction, if available. Confirm the final Measure adopted and Official response.

For the full issue lifecycle, see Workflow for Issues.

Track Commitments

If an issue results in an agreed action, create a commitment from the issue and link it to the relevant stakeholder and the consultation Engagement Plan, if applicable.

Generate Consultation Reports

1. Open the consultation Engagement Plan.
2. Generate the report.

3. Review the report content and stakeholder coverage.

   

The report includes communications, issues, responses, commitments, and closure details.

ⓘ Note: If no report templates are configured yet, contact your Boréalis Admin or the helpdesk.