Stakeholder Map: A tool to create clarity when leading change

Stakeholder maps are used commonly in project management, and they can be incredibly helpful to use for leading change. If you’re dealing with a complex change, you can have multiple leaders collaborate, review, and level set on who are the key groups in your business that need to be involved, and how you will involve them.

Make your Stakeholder Map a living document that your change leaders can update over time and review during check in meetings. Then, when anyone is preparing communication or training, the stakeholder map can become a reference guide to make sure you are targeting messaging to the right level, needs, and concerns of stakeholders. 

At its core, a stakeholder map identifies individuals or groups impacted by a change and categorizes them into minimal groups based on shared characteristics like their level of impact, expected contributions, and common professional language. You’ll also want to rate how resistant each group will be to change and identify key individuals who might energize or detract others around the change.

Set-up your Stakeholder Map 

To create a minimal stakeholder map, you’ll just need to create a table with these columns:

Stakeholder Group

This is the name or category of the group. An easy way to name stakeholder groups is by function (e.g. “NA Sales Team”). In some cases, you may find you can group together multiple functions. In this case a persona, code name, or other descriptive phrase might be more appropriate.  

Stakeholder Description (optional)

It’s not critical to include a description if your stakeholder group name is very obvious. But when you’re combining multiple function areas into one group, it helps to document which functions are in the whole group. For example, if your stakeholder group is “Back office Support”, it will help to note that this group includes accounting, finance, administrative support, customer service, and inside sales, for example.

Engagement Level

Your team should choose at least 3 options to describe engagement levels. At minimum, I would suggest something like: Supportive, Neutral, Resistant. The benefit of flagging engagement level is it can help the team to predict how stakeholders will react to new information.

Impact on Project

Understanding the impact a stakeholder can have on a project is also useful. For example, you may have stakeholders that are highly resistant, but ultimately, if the group doesn’t have a high impact on the success of the change, it might signal how that you can prioritize your time in other areas. Again, keep your options simple. Low, Medium, and High might be more than enough.

Current State / Future State

This is where you state what the stakeholder group is currently doing and what they need to do differently. You can write this a statement like: Instead of X, Do Y. You might want multiple of these columns if there are multiple behaviors users need to do differently.

Key Concerns

Here you document the main issues or worries this group has regarding the change. As you continue through the change curve, other concerns may evolve as well. If you keep your Stakeholder Map as a living document, this will provide critical information to those preparing training or communications. 

Engagement Tactics

A simple summary is all you need here. More details should be provided in a communication plan. At least at this level, you could identify whether you are committing to providing email notifications, training events, listening sessions, or combinations of these.

Owner

Each stakeholder group should have an owner. This individual would be responsible for keeping their row of the stakeholder map up to date. It might also make sense for this owner to be the same person who will deliver communications in the future.

Making the Stakeholder Map a Living Document

Ideally, you will want to keep your stakeholder map up-to-date so that the change management team has accurate picture of the current state of stakeholder concerns and needs.

Consider these tips:

• Consolidate. Each stakeholder group will have its own row in the table, and as you might imagine, the more stakeholders you have, the more quickly it becomes difficult to manage. Look for ways to combine groups or reduce the number of options you will allow in each field. You can always refine as the project progresses, but in general, keep an eye to reducing the number of variables over time instead of increasing them.

• Collaborate. Set the expectation that owners are responsible for updating their rows of the stakeholder map. The easiest way to do this is to store the file in a shared location, and require updates be put in place before check-ins.

• Align. At the start of every check-in, ask each owner to verbalize whether they made any updates to the stakeholder map since the last meeting.

• Reference. Another important expectation to set is that anyone creating communication or training review the stakeholder map and collaborate with the owner to deliver communication.

This is a longer post than some, but ultimately a stakeholder map is not complicated to create or maintain. Putting the effort up front to understand your stakeholders can pay off in aligning your change leaders and creating clarity and consistency.

Plus, when you’re 6 months down the road, and the team has forgotten who needs to be brought along on the change and how, you’ll be glad to have these critical decisions documented and maintained.