Avoiding Stakeholder Surprise: A guide to uncovering your project’s hidden forces

Project Planning

Who is a Stakeholder in a Project?

A stakeholder is anyone who has a vested interest in your project's success or failure. This includes budget holders, fellow employees, customers, partners, and even competitors (if they aren’t impacted, what’s your business case?) - those who will have to live or die by the fruits of your labour. By identifying and managing these stakeholders early, you can ensure that your project meets needs, avoids conflicts, and delivers value.

In this post, I look at how you can effectively identify and classify your stakeholders in order to capture project needs, constraints and benefits.

Do I Need to Identify all the Stakeholders?

In the types of projects I work on, project leads often like to keep the stakeholder list pretty short. Communicating and negotiating with everyone covered by the full definition is not something they usually want to do.

However, it is vital that you identify all relevant stakeholders (or stakeholder groups) in order to deliver a successful project. Otherwise, you may miss the opportunity to fully meet a need (the very business of projects) or you actually create the risk of doing unnecessary work.
 

Yes, this might mean other departments. Yes, this might mean customers and end users. And yes, it might be difficult.

TL;DR - Yes.

Mapping Stakeholders

Stakeholder mapping is a process to help you understand who you need to build relationships with to ensure the success of your project. It’s a cheap and easy activity that has a stunning ROI. In 60-90 minutes, we can:

●    Brainstorm stakeholders
●    Group and prioritise stakeholders
●    Assign people to find out more information
●    Schedule a follow-up session to build out our profiles and create a communication plan

To be 100% clear, this should happen early in the project, once you have your high-level goals and scope, but before anything is too fixed.

The Session

Here’s how I might structure and run an effective stakeholder identification session.

Initially, set the context for your group. Explain the project objectives and broad, high-level scope. Highlight some prompting questions such as:

●    Who benefits from the project?
●    Who has power or influence over it?
●    Who might oppose the plans?
●    Who are the end users or customers of the project?

The session itself could then work like this:

1.    5-10 minutes of individual brainstorming - participants independently write down stakeholders on sticky notes.
2.    Round-robin sharing - each participant shares one or their noted stakeholders at a time.
3.    Categorisation - as we go, the facilitator maps stakeholders into categories of similar groups and individuals e.g. are they internal or external?
4.    Allow and encourage participants to build on each other’s suggestions (you can use ‘yes, and…’ statements).
5.    Assess and prioritise stakeholders or groups in terms of their influence and interest - you can map this onto a grid easily.

Power-interest grid (or Mendelow’s Matrix) example courtesy of Miro: https://miro.com/miroverse/stakeholder-mapping-mendelows-matrix/ 

Once your participants are happy with this grid visualisation, you can decide on the next actions.

You may need more information about the groups to build out profiles. Otherwise, you might just want to figure out how best to communicate with each group, but that’s a tale for another post.

Either way, you’ll be well on your way to effectively managing your stakeholder groups and avoiding those unwanted surprises.

Meanwhile, if you want a conversation about how JAKALA can support you on a project or with your stakeholders, just get in touch.


References:
https://miro.com/blog/stakeholder-mapping/
https://analysisfunction.civilservice.gov.uk/policy-store/stakeholder-mapping/ 
https://www.boreal-is.com/blog/stakeholder-mapping-identify-stakeholders 
https://www.professionalacademy.com/blogs/mendelows-matrix-marketing-theories 
https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/stakeholder-management-task-project-success-7736