Day 46 — Stakeholder series 1/7: “Who, When, How”
Whatever position we are in, unless we grow our own food and don’t have to deal with anyone, we always have stakeholders. CEO has to face the board and shareholders, a janitor has a boss, teachers need to report to the principles, etc. The real questions are: Who is our key stakeholder? What are some efficient and effective ways to manage our stakeholders? Where do we need to pay extra attention to? This article is intended to share some useful techniques in the following structure:
- Know who they are and their attitude: Importance vs. Alignment
- Know when to involve them: Interest vs. Influence
- Know what we need from them: RACI Matrix
Importance vs. Alignment
Let’s start with the definitions of stakeholders. Based one Wikipedia, a stakeholder is a person, group, organization, or system who affects or can be affected by a project’s actions. With this broad definition, you probably can think of many types of stakeholders.
Given limited time & resource, it’s important to map out the 4 types of stakeholders with the two criteria: importance and status of alignment (see figure above).
- Advocate: Let’s start with the best one. The advocate type of stakeholders could be your project sponsor, your boss, and others that have power and provide guidance or actual help. To do: To maintain the relationship, make sure that they’re in the loop with what’s happening, especially when bad things happen.
- Danger: These are the stakeholders that hold a lot of stakes but not necessarily on your side. There could be any kinds of reason for the misalignment, personal, competition, politics, etc. To do: It’s important to under the reason of the misalignment so that we can create corresponding strategy. At a minimum, control the risk by not worsening the relationship or more adversary situation.
- Cautious: Although they might not be as important to the project for the current stage, they might become important one day and requires extra attention. To do: Closely monitor if they change from Cautious to Danger.
- Supportive: This is probably the easiest group for you. Since they are not in the important ones and have less project risk, your attention should probably better spent on other groups. Just make sure to maintain your relationship with them. To do: Show gratitude and share status update with them to keep them informed.
This analysis is a great tool to help assess project risk and take corresponding actions in stakeholder management.
Interest vs. Influence
Another way to analyze your stakeholders and to determine what you approach should be is by using the framework of Interest vs. Influence mapping. This matrix create effective quadrants of 4 types of stakeholders:
- High Influence, High Interest: The most important stakeholders we have to take care of. Because of the interest level, they tend to pay close attention to the project direction and progress. Make sure we provide frequent update, especially when there’s a change on progress, influencing factors. Consult with them before making important decision or change of direction.
- High Influence, Low Interest: Given the influential level, although they might not pay a ton of attention to it, still worth keeping them in the loop and provide enough updates and occasionally consult with them to make sure that they are on our side.
- Low Influence, High Interest: For this type of stakeholders, except for provide routine update, also invite them once in a while in the discussion to make them feel involved. Just make sure they are not disrupting the progress with unsolicited opinions. Also worth keeping a not frequent but routine communication channel, and watch if there influential level changes to high.
- Low Influence, Low Interest: Arguable the group we can spend the least effort in stakeholders management. Provide some soft of low-effort progress update (e.g. email newsletter, knowledge-base system like Confluence or other tools). Keep the low-frequency communication channel open (emails or other contact info) in case they become more interested in the project.
RACI Matrix
Not only it’s crucial to figure out who they are, how to communicate with them, at what frequency, also it’s important to think about how we can get their help. In the beginning of the project, in my experience it’s very helpful to setup RACI matrix for two purposes:
- Who for What: Understand when we need help, who we should reach out to for specific needs;
- Clear Accountability: Ensure everyone knows who’s accountable for what for better project management.
What is RACI Matrix ? RACI is short for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Included; They could be detailed like this:
- Responsible: The people who are actually doing the job, complete the tasks; for example, developer, designer
- Accountable: The (only) person who needs to ensure the work goes the right way; for example, tech lead, design lead
- Consulted: The people who need to be consulted in order to make sure the right info is captured into the decision making process; for example, SME, business sponsor;
- Included: The people who need to be included in the work so that they are informed for their part of the work
So, how do we use it?
- Step 1: we start with break down all the works that require collaboration, exchanging information, or decision making, as you can see in the figure below.
- Step 2: we host a workshop to discuss with the team, who should be R, A, C, I in each work/task. Be sure to restate the definition of RACI to avoid confusion. One other thing that needs to communicate up front is, there can be only one person assigned as Accountable for each work/task, in order to effectively ensure accountability.
- Step 3: Once the team agrees with the result of RACI matrix, send it to key stakeholders, and also document it on the knowledge base, so that the broader team/stakeholder can find that information when they need it.
Conclusion
- Different types of stakeholders, depending on their attitude toward the project, might take us different level of energy to manage them;
- Depending on their level of interest and influence, we can wisely plan our communication channel and frequency to achieve maximum impact with a a reasonable amount of effort/time;
- It’s also important to provide clear accountability in the plan to ensure everyone is clear about how the project should be run.
Do you have any tips or tricks you’d like to share in Stakeholder Management? I’m eager to learn from you.
ABC. Always be clappin’.
