Stansburys Blog

Strategy, Business Change, Portfolio, Programme and Project Management and other ideas

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Peter Stansbury
  • 19Nov

    Stakeholder Mapping Part 1

    Business, Change, P3M, P3MO, Portfolio Management, Programme Management, Project Management, Quality

    There are few things that are more important than understanding and managing your stakeholders.  There is too much to cover in one post – the hint might be in the title – I plan to return to this topic…………  Let me introduce the first tool I recommend to you – the Power-Interest grid:

    Stakeholder map - power interest

    Stakeholder map - power interest

    Map all your stakeholders against this grid.  Basically you are looking at their interest in what you are doing (e.g. project, programme or business change initiative) and their power to influence what you are doing.  According to their position you can start to select the appropriate actions:

    Minimal Effort - phew, the people with a low interest in your initiative combined with their low power places few demands on your comms and stakeholder management teams.

    Keep Informed – a bit more required here, particularly on the communications front.  These people have a high interest in what you are doing, but relatively low power.  Don’t become complacent though, the combined effect of many disgruntled individuals can grow.  Additionally the opinion of one individual may feed up into more powerful bodies such as unions or the press.

    Keep Satisfied – these people need to be kept happy!!  Those with a high level of power but low level of interest need to be kept satisfied.  Bear in mind the level of interest can change rapidly when a stakeholder becomes dis-satisfied.

    Manage Closely – here come your “key players” who should be the key focus of your stakeholder management time and effort.  We will come back in to this in other posts, looking at ways to manage these people.  Above all don’t forget to give them a really good listening to from time to time.

    Remember this map may not remain static over time. In a long and complex programme a stakeholder might have a low interest initially with increasing interest as the change came closer to them.  Also external changes, scope changes and role changes might all move people from one box to another.

    This approach links back effectively to Kotter’s 8 step approach – in particular, step 1 of “creating a sense of urgency” requires effective working with all stakeholders and step 2 “building a powerful guiding coalition” means working effectively with your key players.  And don’t forget, the earlier you start these activities the better!

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    Posted by PeterStansbury @ 4:48 pm

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