Keep Your Stakeholders Happy

A Stakeholder is a person with a Direct or Indirect interest in your deliverable. All our professional life we are working with multiple stakeholders. A project can be successful only if all the stakeholders are convinced and sign it off.

An individual's career is almost always defined by his Stake Holders and how they are kept engaged.

The Stakeholder Matrix is a very simple but effective tool to categorize stakeholders and determine stakeholder interaction with the project.

A Stakeholder Matrix has 2 variable which are most important to a customer : Power and Interest.

• Power?is the ability of the stakeholder to stop or change the project.?For example, a government regulatory approval authority has a very high level of power.
• Interest?is the size of the overlap between the stakeholder’s and the project’s goals.?For example, a landowner who’s house has to be removed to make way for a project has a very high interest.

The Stakeholder Matrix has Power and Interest plotted on a chart with the x-axis being interest and the y-axis being power.?The resulting chart might feel very simple but it is a solid analysis of the stakeholder’s interaction with the project.

Step 1. Determine your Stakeholders

Step 2. Plot them in one of the four quadrants.

Step 3. Agree with the Stakeholders on Frequency of reporting. For eg. Stakeholders who need to be kept informed can be informed via an email once a month. Stakeholders who are to managed closely may need to be engaged every week or twice a week.

Step 4. Update the Matrix as and when new Stakeholders are added or removed.