Stakeholder Engagement & Management

Stakeholders can be thought of as parties interested in the successful delivery of a project or piece/book of work. In order to know how best to deal with them, it is usually helpful to think of stakeholders in terms of Hewn Rock Group’s Power-Interest (P-I) grid. Basically, this follows from the well known premise that not all stakeholders are equally powerful, influential or interested in the outcome of a project. The P-I grid is intended to help business analysts know who fits where early on. The P-I grid can be useful for understanding and filling in the following:

a. Programme Structure/Delivery Model: This can be captured at three different levels:

i.Governance: Typically, this will be the Programme or Project Board. In some cases, it can also be a Steering Committee and will consist of the most powerful and highest impacted individuals within an organisation. These can be budget holders or approval Committee members. Typically, they are accountable executives.

ii.Design Authority: This is a forum that is responsible for reviewing and revising an existing business model or designing a new one in order to fulfil the core deliverable/s of a project.

iii.Working Group (WG): These are typically individuals with a strong working or operational knowledge of the business or change area within the business operations. WG can be set up to address project issues in a specific workstream or across multiple workstreams with an overall collective interest. The objective is to manage specific issues arising from completing work packages and fixing associated challenges within a workstream or multiple workstreams. The number of WGs often depends on a number of factors, e.g. the complexity of the delivery, organisational culture (collaborative, bureaucratic, silo-ed etc.)

b. RACI Matrix: Stakeholders should be properly understood and their involvement or level of power and interest can be categorised using a RACI Matrix. This will help ascertain how best to engage them, what kind and level of detail they are interested in, and very importantly, how to avoid miscommunicating with them.

An alternative artefact to use instead of a RACI Matrix is a Stakeholder Map.