Stakeholder Analysis is something which is often not done properly or skipped entirely during project planning.  I speak from experience here.

Early in my career as a project manager I paid less attention to project stakeholders than I should have.

I then realised the principal reason some projects were so difficult to manage was because I had not considered stakeholders properly, nor sought to engage with them meaningfully.

I soon learned that considering project stakeholders did not take long and spending time on stakeholder analysis during the early stages of project planning paid dividends later.

Unsurprisingly therefore, I now emphasise the need for stakeholder identification, analysis and engagement during my legal project management and legal process improvement training courses.

This post provides a further reminder and describes a short, practical and structured approach to stakeholder analysis.

Team Facilitation

Like many people I used to believe that it was down to the project manager to come up with all the answers regarding project planning and delivery.

I was wrong again.

Project teams are usually made up of people with a lot of cumulative experience and a varied range of insights.

Drawing out, and acting on, the project team’s views about all aspects of the project is an essential part of a project managers role.

To do this successfully, project managers must have good facilitation skills.

Like all skills, facilitation skills can be learned and developed with practice.

I often use the simple techniques set out below when working with legal teams to help them identify and solve issues of all kinds, not just those associated with stakeholders.

So, using facilitation skills and working with the project team, how should you, as a project manager, make a start with stakeholder analysis?

Step 1: Identify Stakeholders

A classic definition of stakeholders:

Any people (or groups) with an interest in your project, are affected by it or can influence its outcome.

The first step is to simply list these people or groups.

Some stakeholders will be obvious, such as end-users of a new I.T system perhaps.

Some may be less obvious: in commercial litigation projects for example, potential defendants are stakeholders.

You can list stakeholders with increasing degrees of granularity as more information becomes available to you and your team.  Start by listing organisations or departments before drilling down to individuals within those organisations and departments if they are known.

For some projects, such as the development of an I.T system to be deployed across a large organisation, it is impossible for the project team to know of all potential end-users (and therefore stakeholders) individually.  This is one reason software development teams will mock-up personas, which are representations of typical stakeholders.

Identifying stakeholders can be done quickly as a brainstorming exercise.

I find team brainstorming sessions to be most productive when the team work within time constraints.  So, I will ask team members to work alone for, say, 2 minutes.  During this time, they must write out as many stakeholders as they can think of on post-it notes – one stakeholder per post-it note.

(Please note that this exercise, and everything else which follows, can also be done virtually by using platforms such as Miro.  For ease of explanation, I will assume the team is meeting in-person and working with hard-copy materials.  In a later post I will explain how I use Miro for virtual team facilitation).

Step 2: Prioritise Stakeholders

Because of the brainstorming session above, the team is likely to have generated a long list of potential stakeholders to consider.

You and the team are unlikely to have the time to consider in depth all the potential stakeholders listed.  Hence the stakeholders will need to be ranked and prioritised.

A quick and fun way of doing this is to use dot voting.

Here’s how to run a dot voting exercise.

1. Ask all team members to put their post-it notes naming stakeholders on a wall or board.
2. Then take out the duplicates. Team members have worked alone generating their own individual list of potential stakeholders, so when everyone’s list is put together there are bound to be duplicates.
3. Explain to the team that they can vote for the stakeholders they believe are likely to have most impact on the project. Each team member can have, say, three votes each. Team members can distribute their three votes any way they like.  Some may give one stakeholder all 3 of their votes, while others might give three stakeholders one vote each.  Voting is done by each team member simply placing a dot with a marker pen on the stakeholders they want to vote for.
4. After voting, arrange the post-it notes in descending order, with the post-it notes (stakeholders) with most votes (dots) at the top. This ranking order is the team’s view of who the most important stakeholders are – i.e. those who are likely to have most impact on the project.

Step 3: Analyse Stakeholders

Now you have your most important stakeholders to consider, it is time to analyse them.

Stakeholder analysis can also be done quickly, especially when working with the project team.

Let’s assume the result of the prioritisation exercise above shows that four stakeholders are considered significantly more important to the project than others.

The obvious thing to do now is to ask the team to analyse these four stakeholders.

Let’s further assume that you have a project team of 8 people.

Split the team up into pairs, with each pair having one stakeholder to analyse.

Stakeholder analysis is essentially about asking questions and coming up with plausible answers about the stakeholders.

The answers should help team members understand things such as the attitude of the stakeholders to the project, how the team can work with them constructively and how to communicate with them effectively.

Some illustrative questions to ask of each stakeholder:

• What is each stakeholders attitude toward the project?
• What influence and power do they have?
• What does the project team need from each stakeholder?
• What should the team do to ensure it gets what it needs from each stakeholder?

Answering questions such as these need not take each pair of team members long.

To make sure the analysis is done swiftly and to help the team members focus, apply time constraints again.  I would allow the pairs 5 minutes to do the analysis of their stakeholder.

The results of each pairs analysis could again be captured in post it notes.

After analysing each stakeholder, I also give each pair two minutes to present a summary of their views to the wider team.  This lets other team members comment on individual stakeholders.  It also lets all team members consider all the key stakeholders as each pair explains their findings.

Stakeholder analysis completed – what’s next?

After completing these three steps you and your team will have quickly identified and analysed some key project stakeholders.

The next immediate step for me as project manager is to make sure I record the results of the team’s work.  I collect and organise all the post-it notes and transcribe the team’s stakeholder list and analysis into electronic format which the team can use and refer to.

This may be a simple matrix grid, using either Microsoft Word or Excel, recording the all the stakeholders identified and the team’s analysis to date.

I also like to capture and present this information in the format of a mind map, as shown in the illustration.  Mind maps are usually quick to create and because they are more visual than spreadsheets, it is much easier to see links between each stakeholder and identify areas of common interest between stakeholders.

Summary

Stakeholder identification and analysis need not take long.

They are an essential prerequisite for understanding how to engage with stakeholders productively.  This increases the likelihood that your project will be successful.

Often a root cause of project failure can be traced back to poor communications with key stakeholders.

So increase your chances of project success by working with your team and conduct a short stakeholder analysis exercise during the early stages of project planning.