Stakeholder map: a practical guide
By Kenya Moura and Vitor Pires
“When will this functionality be ready for production?”
Who has never heard this question? Especially for Business Analysts, this question is very frequent coming from people interested in the project or product. Although it is a question about the deadline, in this text we are not going to focus on that, but on whoever asks that question: the Stakeholder. We call Stakeholder any person interested in the project or product, including technical people, so don’t get attached just to that Super Manager Person who pays the bills.
Each Stakeholder has its contribution to the project, with business and financial information, or by the technical part. Each has its role and its influence for the success of the project. Some are more active, while others we need to insist to participate more. There are still those who are more engaged with the success of the product than others.
The importance of the Stakeholders
The idea that stakeholders exist to impose deadlines and raise barriers for implementation is common, but this vision and the establishment of this type of relationship with stakeholders can be problematic.
In reality, stakeholders must be considered important sources of information to help guide business and product decisions. They are also important sources of feedback, not only after having implemented a new functionality, but also in stages prior to development, in the process of discovering a functionality and helping with the validation of the real value that it could deliver after implementing it. Since stakeholders may have a very broad view of the company’s processes, they can share different paths and possibilities.
In preliminary stages, this feedback is important to guide the business strategy. Thus, stakeholders must be treated with such importance from the beginning of the relationship so that they share the responsibility and act constructively in the product development, supporting in the evaluation of restrictions and risks, the removal of possible blockers and be part of the success.
Ultimately, we are talking about people working together within an organization. So it is important that you know well your Stakeholder in order to learn how each person deals with the day-to-day problems, and what they need from you and what you need from them, including at what level of information the conversations need to be.
Creating a Stakeholder Map
The stakeholder map is part of the toolkit of business people and can be applied in various contexts of product development, as well as startups, consultancies and large companies. After all, with each product evolution, it gains new internal and external stakeholders.
Below you can find the steps of the activities that we follow, however we believe that for each situation the time and scope of this activity can be flexible, that is, you can adapt it according to your needs and goals. We have already had cases that we need to schedule more than one day to finish this and another that we had to summarize and do it in an hour.
1) List the stakeholders
Before doing anything, it is necessary to know who are the people outside the team you interacted with to carry out your work. For this, a brainstorming session of the names of the stakeholders will be carried out. So each member of the team must remember who they had to talk to today, yesterday and last week. Put each name on a post-it or use any digital tool you prefer, but you will need to move names around. Try to think of specific people and not teams, and it is okay if more than one person is mentioned on the same team.
Tip: At the end, ask if there is a stakeholder that is important, but has not been placed on any post-it. As we are doing the activity based on the people we had contact with, it can sometimes happen that you have some strategic stakeholder that for some reason you may not have much contact, but it would be good to have it on the map.
Another tip: Encourage people to reflect on who they tried to contact but failed, and also people who sought contact with them. As it is an individual activity, take a moment at the end to group and refine the repeated or similar post-its.
2) Check the frequency of interaction with a Stakeholder
Now you have several names listed, ask people in the group to make a mark or a dot for each time they needed to interact with each stakeholder today, yesterday and last week. We recommend separating a timebox to schedule each period for each stakeholder.
Sort by the number of markings and with the most marked at the top and the least at the bottom. Now you have a list of frequency :) (happy face).
The list now should look like this:
3) Map of frequency vs influence
Start from the top of the list and, for each name, drag to the right by how much influence or power they have over your ability to achieve the project’s goal. At this point you can ignore how much they want the project to succeed or not, the focus should be on the power of influence.
See how this activity will look:
4) Select the most important ones
It is possible that in step 1 several names emerged that may not be as influential for the success of your project. With the frequency vs influence map you will be able to see those stakeholders who have a lot of influence and who you don’t have a lot of contact with.
Now you will need to prioritize some stakeholders which should continue in the list. Start with the people who have more power to influence the success of your project. There is no perfect number of stakeholders, so choose as many as you think is necessary. But remember that the more names on the board, the more time you will have to set aside for the next activities and perhaps the less focus you will give to each one of them.
5) Separate between supportive and non-supportive stakeholders
Remember when I said that there are people more concerned with the success of your project than others? So, in this step you will reflect on how each stakeholder positions themselves or acts to support the team to be successful or not. For instance, if they share important information, ask constructive questions or make sure of responding in a timely manner to the questions addressed to them, it shows that they are supporting stakeholders.
We will create two groups of stakeholders. On one hand, the people who normally support you and on the other hand, those who do not and end up hindering the success of your project. The more supportive the stakeholders are, you should position them to the right, and to the left, the ones who normally do not support you, and close to the center, the neutral ones.
At this point we can also think about any stakeholder who feels threatened with the success of your project or if there is any conflict of interest. With this division of stakeholders, you will be able to observe that sometimes there will be people with high power of influence, but who may not be on your side to support you. :/ (disappointed face)
Here’s how it should look:
6) Active or passive stakeholders
How active or passive are these stakeholders in their support or lack of support? To identify this behavior, we will use the same graph generated in the previous step and add another variable within that graph: activity or passivity. Looking again at each stakeholder previously identified as supporters or not, we will go up or down each them to indicate that they are more active or passive in their support or lack thereof.
If the stakeholder is very active both to give support and to hinder you, they should be closer to the top of the graph. And if the stakeholder is more passive or neutral they should be at the bottom or in the middle.
Remember to take care not to move them in a horizontal direction at this time, otherwise you will change the measurements on the support indication of each person previously identified.
In this graph you will be able to have the vision of people who support you or not and how active they are in doing this, see the example:
7) Create actions to improve the relationship with stakeholders
Now, we already know the following information for each stakeholder:
- Frequency of contact and how important they are for us to achieve our goals,
- Level of power or influence they have over our ability to achieve our goals,
- Whether they want us to succeed or not, and how much,
- How active they are in supporting us or not.
Having this vision of the whole you will be able to prioritize and focus the time spent on building relationships with your stakeholder, for example:
If a stakeholder has a high frequency of contact with the team and a high power of influence, it is probably worth investing more time with them than in another with few influence.
It also allows you to identify risks in our stakeholder scenario, for example:
If we have a highly influential stakeholder, but she doesn’t want us to be successful and is actively working against us, we will need to figure out how to deal with that person. Can we make them more passive? Make them more supportive? Can we affect the amount of influence they have?
Here are some questions to help you:
- How can we keep that supportive person on our side?
- How can we make them more passive?
- How can we make them more supportive?
- How can we affect the amount of influence they have?
- How can we make this detractor less active?
- How can we bring this detractor to our side?
- How can we make passive supporters more active?
You will have to assign team members who need to take actions to help improve this relationship. And as usual, every action taken must a deadline to be met.
8) Matrix of need: What they need from us Vs. What we need from them
This is an optional step that may be added to this activity. This is a moment that you can set aside to identify and deepen a little bit more in the dependencies that your team may have with certain stakeholders, as well as to identify which ones need you and what they need. Identifying these points can be useful for the step of thinking about actions on how to build better relationships with these stakeholders.
The visual model we use:
9) Document the learnings
Don’t forget to document everything you’ve learned from the stakeholder mapping activity! You can document in a spreadsheet with all following fields and establish levels from 1 to 5 for each requirement, for example: Level of frequency of contact, influence, support and so on.
Revisit the outputs of this activity periodically, when changing contexts, stakeholders or whenever necessary: the spreadsheet can help you with quick queries. You can also create personas for your stakeholders, with photos, LinkedIn, ambitions and personal data, but we know that depending on your level of contact with them, this information may be difficult to obtain.
Finally, as we already mentioned, you can be creative with the steps of this activity and adapt them depending on the information that is most important to you. The important thing is that this process can support you to get closer to the stakeholders important to your project and establish bonds that bring benefits for both parties.
We hope that this material can support you in customer relationships.
Did you like it? So leave comments on whether you were able to apply this activity and what was the result! Have questions or criticisms? Leave it here in the comments too! This help us improve more and more, and refine this mapping process for everyone!
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