stakeholder analysis Archives - Management Pocketbooks

Pocketblog has gone back to basics. This is part of an extended management course.

We are working through a series of blogs, looking at some of the essential models that a project manager will need. We will cover:

The Stakeholder Management Process

Stakeholder management starts during scoping, to understand their varying needs and wants, and negotiate with them to balance stakeholders’ long shopping lists with your constrained resources. In the planning stage, you need to figure out how to win over – or at least pacify – the doubters and keep your supporters happy, so that throughout this stage and the implementation stage, you can engage with your stakeholders actively. In the evaluation stage you will need their perceptions if you want to create a full assessment of your project.

The broad process for managing stakeholders has four steps.

Stakeholder Plan

Build your plan for each stakeholder, based on your assessment of:

what they want from you
what you want from them
what level of influence and power they have
how supportive or sceptical they are
… and any other factors

Your plan should contain:

The messages you want to communicate
The means by which you plan to communicate them
What attitude to take (for example: consultative, informing, instructing, requesting…)
The best time to deliver each message
Who will be responsible for preparing and delivering each message
How you will test whether the message has gone down as you intended
How you will gather feedback from the stakeholder

Stakeholders are vital to your project. It is they, after all, who will pass the final verdict on whether it has a success…

or a failure.

Émile Durkheim

Émile Durkheim has to rank among the great names of social science and is, perhaps, the founding thinker in our modern ideas about social networks. He first distinguished between ‘traditional’ societies where individuals bow to pressures to subsume their individuality into a homogeneous whole; and more ‘modern’ societies where we seek to harness the diversity of people, by co-operation. Social phenomena, he argued, are the result of these interactions.

Ferdinand Tönnies

His contemporary, Ferdinand Tönnies, distinguished between ‘community’ and ‘society’. Communities share values and beliefs, whilst a society is tied together by formal links such as obligations, management and trade.

Georg Simmel

A third contemporary, Georg Simmel, first looked at the social distance between people and how this can affect our sense of individuality if we get too close to another person, or our sense of connection if we are too far.

Jacob Moreno

It was Romanian-born American psychiatrist Jacob Moreno who gave us the tool that I want to focus on: the sociogram. He looked at how interactions occur in small groups, such as classrooms and workplaces. Sociograms are still widely used as a way of charting and understanding the relationships among groups of young people. Some of the earliest graphical depictions of social networks appear in his 1934 book Who Shall Survive?

Jump Sixty Years

Nowadays, we are all very familiar with the way the internet is widely connected and the concept of ‘small world’ networks is widely bandied about.

However, these diagrams derive from Moreno’s sociograms, which remain a powerful tool for charting workplace networks.

Stakeholder Analysis

As a project manager, I have used sociograms to chart the relationships between stakeholders within and outside organisations, to better understand how I can anticipate and handle resistance to change, and how to harness and reinforce the support that I have.

Anticipating Conflict

Max Eggert and Wendy Falzon recommend using sociograms to anticipate conflict between co-workers.

In their Resolving Conflict Pocketbook, they give the example of a workgroup of five colleagues. They show how, by drawing a simple sociogram, you could anticipate which potential sub-teams could lead to conflict.

Other Management Pocketbooks you might enjoy

The Handling Resistance Pocketbook

The Working Relationships Pocketbook

The Discipline and Grievance Pocketbook

The Influencing Pocketbook

The Networking Pocketbook

The Handling Complaints Pocketbook