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 RACI model; it’s one of the most common models for analyzing stakeholders!
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 RACI method.
What is the RACI Method of Stakeholder Management?
Some people find the RACI method to be a little simpler than the power/interest model, because it’s just an acronym to remember how to categorize stakeholders.
R – Responsible. These are the folks who are responsible for completing the work. Let’s look at two examples within higher ed: planning a Family Weekend, and implementing an academic advising CRM system.
In our Family Weekend example, responsible folks might be the coordinator and team of students working to plan, staff, and evaluate the program. In our academic advising example, this might be the committee selecting the software platforms to compare, scheduling demos, and working with IT to facilitate implementation. In both examples, these are the folks without whom the work doesn’t get done.
A – Accountable. These are the people who are “on the hook” for “owning” the work. There’s often overlap between responsible and accountable parties, but the accountable group is smaller.
So in our Family Weekend example, the accountable parties are the coordinator and perhaps that coordinator’s director. (Who will the Dean of Students come after if the program goes off the rails; who will get the shout-out in a divisional meeting when it goes well?)
In our advising CRM example, this might be the director of the academic advising office.
C – Consulted. These are the people who need to be consulted because of some level of expertise (or, hearkening back to our power/interest model, because they have very high degrees of both power over and interest in the project). They don’t perform the work on a day-to-day basis (so they’re not in the Responsible umbrella), and they’re not ultimately the owner of the project (so they’re not in the Accountable umbrella).
In our Family Weekend example, this might be a parent council, or a Dean of Students. In our advising CRM example, this might be the registrar’s office, or the chief information officer.
I – Informed. These are people who need to be kept up to date, but who aren’t decision-makers or people doing the day-to-day work. Typically this is where your broader community is going to fall.
In our Family Weekend example, this would certainly be the families you’re inviting, and could also be faculty or other staff on campus who aren’t involved in planning activities for the weekend. In our advising CRM example, this could be the larger community of advisors who will ultimately use the platform, as well as on-the-ground IT staff who will be involved in supporting the platform after it’s implemented.
So you have a RACI Matrix… now what?
Remember that the goal of stakeholder management models is always to give us information to act on. In this case, dividing stakeholders into a matrix like this helps us plan how we communicate with different groups of people.
For example, we might know that if someone need to be consulted, we need to plan to ask for their input many months (or even years, in the case of something like a campus-wide CRM) in advance of when we plan to be executing the project. This method of managing the Consulted folks might impact everything from how long we plan the project to last, to which semester we kick off based on busy seasons for the Responsible folks.
(This, by the way, is an example of the Project Life Cycle intersecting with stakeholder management!)
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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