Stakeholders are invested in the project and will be affected by it at any point along
the way, and their input can directly impact the outcome. The goal is to understand
how each stakeholder can help the team, how involved they should be and who to contact when things come up. Knowing this will help you keep the communication
appropriate, manage expectations, navigate roadblocks.
Early in the project, facilitate a session to identify and map out all the
stakeholders that will affect the team or the team will interact with. This can also be
done as part of a kick-off meeting.
You will need:
A Stakeholder Map – here you'll note down all the people involved, their roles, areas of responsibility, decision making and relationships.
🧐 Tip: Invite someone who knows more people than you and can suggest who’s who.
Instructions:
During the session:
1. Identify who is in the core team, who is involved, and who should be informed.
2. Identify decision makers and heavy influencers.
3. Identify who to manage closely with special attention.
🧐 Tip: Keep an eye out for other useful bits of information:
the area of expertise a particular stakeholder focuses on. Discussing anything outside their area of expertise might be misleading and only confuse.
Skill levels, differences in how efficient each person may or may not be.
Who has the most history with the company or product.
Preferred communication and work methods.
Constraints, such as time zone issues.
What to do with stakeholders?
Build relationships with the people e.g. set up intro meetings or interviews to
get to know the other person in general and to understand their expectations
and motivations specifically. This also helps gain supporters, or allies, and
create a comfortable and inclusive project environment.
Gain visibility of the project, by keeping necessary people in the loop and
updated. This will help avoid necessary people finding out about the project
when it’s too late.
Decide how you’ll communicate with each stakeholder or groups of
stakeholders, how frequently, which cadence and what type of updates. Be
smart about how to interact with the necessary stakeholders at the right time
with the right amount of information e.g. send a weekly update to
stakeholders that need to be informed, but don’t invite them to daily
meetings. It seems like a no-brainer, but saves a lot of effort and avoids late
communication and people not being aware about the progress of your
project.
Comments