Stakeholder management is one of the all-time most common project management topics — I’d argue that this and “scope” are the Big 2 — and there are lots of methods to tackle it. Today we’ll talk through the Stakeholder Management Power/Interest Model; it’s one of the most common models for analyzing stakeholder management!
Stakeholder management will definitely come up once you start integrating PM into your professional life; one of the most common topics for PM professional development sessions is stakeholder management, and one of the most common questions to ask in a project management interview is some variation of “how do you manage stakeholders?”
And really, as someone currently working in higher ed, this is to your advantage! Stakeholder management isn’t a throwaway question; it’s incredibly applicable to working as a project manager, which ALSO means it’s probably something you’re already doing. There are also a lot of “right” answers (which is always my favorite kind of question). So let’s start a series looking at a couple different ways to analyze (and then manage) stakeholders!
I’ve selected these because they’re the most common methods you’ll see in PM education — which means they’re great methods to have in your toolkit when you first start talking to others about how you use stakeholder management methods in your current position.
But I want to underscore: there are many, many ways to do this… you may even come up with your own model as you dig into project management work! These methods are a solid foundation to get you started in the right direction.
Preparing for Stakeholder Management: Analysis
Remember that the goal of stakeholder analysis is always to give yourself actionable next steps.
That means that the first steps, no matter what model you’re deciding to apply, are always the same:
- Familiarize yourself with the strategic objectives of the project
- Make a list of every single person or organization that might have an interest in the project or who might be impacted by it. (Sometimes stakeholders aren’t even aware that the project is happening, but might be heavily impacted by it, so we can’t go by interest alone.)
From there, we have many different methods we can apply. Today, let’s take a look at the power/interest matrix method, which you might also see written as “power/interest mapping” or “power/interest analysis”. (They’re all the same!)
Method: Power/Interest Mapping
This method identifies the power that each stakeholder has over that specific project, as well as the interest they have in that specific project. (Even if someone is very powerful generally, or interested in your work generally, they may not have much influence over your specific project, or be that interested in this specific project’s objectives. That’s why you have to repeat this process for each project.)
From there, we can divide our stakeholders and map them into a model with four quadrants, which will give us some guidance around how we plan to communicate with these stakeholders. This model ultimately looks like this:
High power & high interest: Manage closely.
These are folks who have a lot of influence over your project and who are likely to be keeping a close eye on it. We’re thinking here of people like the project’s sponsor, the leader of a division responsible for the project’s objectives. A few relevant higher ed examples:
- If you’re leading the implementation of a new CRM, the enrollment management VP is likely extremely interested in what you’re doing.
- If you’re leading Family Weekend at an institution that has a Family Council, that council’s leadership has power and interest over what you’re doing.
You can imagine that this group will need a lot of communication with a lot of detail. Their goal is to understand the inner workings of the project, and if you gloss over the finer points of an update, they’re the ones likely to follow up with questions. This means that your goal is to proactively involve them, share details, and solicit feedback in ways that satisfy their keen interest in the project.
Done well, your management of this group makes them more likely to use their power on your behalf (both for you professionally and for the projects you manage) in the future.
High power & low interest: Keep satisfied.
These are folks who have a lot of power and/or influence over your project but who might not be all that interested in what you’re doing.
- In our CRM example, this might be an IT lead that isn’t assigned directly to the project (because they could make a single phone call that would derail your whole project), or it might be a VP of Student Affairs, who knows in theory that the work is important but isn’t all that interested in the mechanics of how a CRM implementation rolls out.
- In our Family Weekend example, it might be a Dean of Students or an Ombudsperson; while their work is aligned with yours, their plates are likely overflowing with responsibilities that keep them from being in the weeds of what you’re doing… but if you did something wrong, you’d definitely hear about it from them.
Whenever a group’s interest is low, this means that they probably don’t want a lot of communication from us. A VP of Student Affairs, for example, might be perfectly satisfied with monthly updates about a CRM implementation over the year-long project, and a Dean of Students might want a single update about the details of Family Weekend (date, theme, etc) once they’re solidified and perhaps a report-out as part of a larger divisional report on the success of the program. Neither of these people are curious about the project, so we don’t want to communicate with them as if they are.
Done well, stakeholder management here results in increased trust between you and the stakeholder; they know they can count on you to keep things humming without much input from them. (For many people, this is the entire point of a project manager.)
Low power & high interest: Keep informed
These are folks who are very interested in your project but who — for whatever reason — don’t have a high degree of influence. This might be because you’re at a very large institution and they’re far from you in the org chart; it may be because they’re relatively junior (perhaps even junior to you).
- In our CRM example, this might be the individual advisors, who use a CRM in every appointment every day and who are therefore very interested in how it rolls out, but who might not be on the committee to select and implement.
- In our Family Weekend example, this might be individual families who aren’t on the planning team, but who are waiting on pins and needles to “save the date” for the program.
These stakeholders are exactly the opposite of the high power/low interest folks, which means we communicate with them very differently. Their high interest means they want frequent updates; advisors, for example, might read minutes of every single planning meeting, and families might be very interested in “behind the scenes” content on a platform like Facebook or Instagram.
Notice that in this example, we’re using very different tactics (email updates vs social media content) to achieve the exact same strategic goal: keeping highly-interested stakeholders in the loop in a way that genuinely honors their interest.
Done well, stakeholder management here means that low-power stakeholders (who almost always know they don’t have power compared to many others) feel heard and considered. Achieves the exact same goal as the high power/low interest group (building trust in your work) using VERY different methods.
Low power & low interest: Monitor
This is an interesting group because their backgrounds are so various. Example: some stakeholders are low interest because they literally don’t know your project exists, but might be very high-interest if they did know about it. Other stakeholders remain low interest even after months or years of you trying to drum up interest in your work.
For whatever reason, this is a group of stakeholders who aren’t interested in the work you’re doing and who don’t have a lot of power and influence over it, anyway. The above example probably illuminates why “monitor” is the starting strategy for this group; if a stakeholder doesn’t know about your work… should they? If they learn about your work midway through the project, will their interest level change? And if so, what (if any) work needs to happen to get them up to speed?
- In our CRM example, think about students, who in theory are the most impacted by effective (or ineffective) use of a CRM but who could not care less about which CRM you choose or how you implement it, and who would have very little power over the process even if they did care, which they don’t. You’d want to monitor them — and perhaps you’d do this through strategic assessment/survey work, or perhaps by analyzing graduation rates — but you wouldn’t solicit their feedback specifically about the CRM (least of all because they wouldn’t give it to you because they don’t care lol)
- In our Family Weekend example, think about families who have specifically decided they’re not going to Family Weekend because it’s just not the kind of programming they care about. We probably do want to monitor them because we want to know if there’s something they’re specifically dissatisfied with about your program vs other schools, or if the price is too high or if the program feels exclusive. We want to know if they somehow missed the announcement altogether but would have loved to come if they knew about it.
In all these cases, we’re monitoring for the low-hanging fruit. Is there something we can do or change to immediately make a positive impact on this group?
Once we’re satisfied that we’ve gotten all the strategically low-hanging fruit, we get to just leave this group alone on a day-to-day basis… because that’s probably what they want anyway 🙂
Wrapping Up Stakeholder Management
One thing I hope you’re thinking to yourself at at least some points during this post is “I pretty much do that automatically.”
You’re probably right! Stakeholder management methods are formalized processes and models for what many of us already do: understanding what specific people or groups want out of our project and communicating with them accordingly.
If you’re already doing a lot of this, my challenge to you is to begin mapping what you’re already doing to one of the models we’ll discuss in this series. (You might even find some changes to make!) Then, practice using the language this post uses to get yourself used to describing your work using project management terms.
If you’re not already doing this, I hope this post and the others in the series help you feel empowered to demystify stakeholder management work and take on some of these methods into your own work moving forward!
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