In business, success is rarely down to one person. Delivering a great project, or creating a new relationship is generally a team effort that involves multiple people, including your colleagues, customers, end users and community members.
Understanding who the stakeholders are in any business project is critical to success, and stakeholder mapping is a useful way to gain this insight. “Stakeholder mapping is about identifying all the people who will be involved in, or affected by your business project, and understanding their priorities, pressures and goals,” explains Conor Neild-Crabb, Head of Strategy, Black Capital Group. “It helps us to understand who is important and helps the customer to understand the impact of the project.”
What is a stakeholder map?
At Innovia Technology, the project management team creates a stakeholder map whenever the company has a new customer or a new project.
The map is a visual representation of everyone involved in the organisation that will touch a project, who may be required to sign off on the outcomes, or who may be affected by the delivered project.
“Our map shows who everyone is, how and when they will be involved, what knowledge that person holds and what their relationships are,” says Laura Churcher, Head of Business Strategy at Innovia Technology.
What are the three steps to stakeholder mapping?
Stakeholder mapping can look different depending on your organisation and your existing relationship with a customer, but most maps will be created with these three steps in mind:
Identify
To start stakeholder mapping, you need to identify who the stakeholders are. You can only build and manage powerful relationships when you truly understand who is delivering, approving, and impacted by a project.
An effective way to kick off stakeholder identification is by hosting a collaborative brainstorming session, which can include your team, key partners, or even the client. “If it’s a new customer, we sit down with them and ask who’s who in their organisation, what do they do, and who is going to be signing this off,” says Churcher.
Depending on the project, your stakeholders could include suppliers, contractors and employees. Paying them in full and on time can help build better relationships, and using your American Express® Business Gold Card means you can enjoy payment terms of up to 54 days, which can help make cash flow management more flexible¹.
Prioritisation
Not all stakeholders will be of equal importance throughout a project. So your map should indicate who the most important stakeholders are at each stage of a project, and who will be the day-to-day contacts.
This stage of stakeholder mapping is critical in ensuring that resources are allocated effectively, says Conor Neild-Crabb, Head of Strategy at consulting firm Black Capital Group. “You might be working with a contractor that has multiple subcontractors, but there are also stakeholders in the community, like end consumers,” he says. “Mapping means you can understand who has what pressures and priorities, but also their influence on the project. You can then understand where to allocate your time and resources for best effect.”
Weighing risks and opportunities
Once you have identified and prioritised stakeholders, your map should consider risks and opportunities. Stakeholder mapping should consider what factors could delay or derail your project, as well as potential opportunities to accelerate your project.
This stage allows project managers to potentially mitigate risk or identify strategies to deal with potential delays before they happen, says Churcher. “If you have a good stakeholder mapping process, it’s 100% easier to be agile and adapt to emerging risks or change direction,” she says.
Stakeholder mapping example
A large food and beverage company asked Innovia Technology to help them work on an innovation project focused on improving sustainability. Innovia’s project team spent several weeks completing project mapping.
“We started by sitting down with our contact at the client company and identifying the stakeholders involved in the project on their side from senior leadership down to functional leaders and managers,” says Churcher. “We then used information from our customer relationship management (CRM) system to populate the map with details of responsibilities and things we knew about each stakeholder based on prior contact we’d had with them.”
This insight allowed Innovia to understand the interest, impact and influence of each stakeholder on the project, and the team could then map the relationships between Innovia, the stakeholders, and between different stakeholder groups.
“The stakeholder mapping process supports us in delivering better project outcomes because we can allocate resources where it’s most needed and understand the relationships that we as a supplier need to focus on building,” says Churcher. “We can also use the mapping to identify where we might need to do socialisation calls to support new relationships, in readiness for later project stages.”
Stakeholder mapping is important for businesses of all sizes. Whatever your business size, knowing and understanding your stakeholders, whether internal or external, can significantly impact the success of a project. For a smaller business, stakeholder mapping helps with the prioritisation of resources and clarity on who will be most impacted by decisions.
Pros and cons of stakeholder mapping
There are several important benefits of stakeholder mapping, starting with improved communication and understanding, says Neild-Crabb. “Stakeholder mapping brings improved communication between your organisation and the stakeholders, which in turn enhances your credibility as a supplier,” he says.
Additionally, stakeholder mapping can improve risk management by helping you to identify potential bumps in the road – and plan how to navigate them. “This drives better project outcomes and helps you to allocate resources to a stakeholder based on specific needs and priorities,” he adds.
Stakeholder mapping can bring challenges, especially when working with a new customer, or when a project is fast changing – which brings new stakeholders. “You need to remember that stakeholders can change, and remain agile,” says Neild-Crabb. “The map is a living document.”
Stakeholder matrix vs stakeholder mapping
Stakeholder mapping has much in common with a stakeholder matrix, but while a stakeholder map is a visual representation of “who’s who” in a project, a matrix is designed to categorise these stakeholders based on their level of interest and influence to prioritise engagement.
A typical stakeholder matrix will plot individual stakeholders on a graph with an “x” and “y” axis that measures how high or low a stakeholder ranks according to specific factors. For example, a stakeholder might rank ‘high’ in terms of influence but ‘low’ in terms of ‘interest’ in a project. By plotting multiple stakeholders on this type of matrix, businesses can identify where relationships may need to be strengthened to gain support for a project in its lifetime.
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