Stakeholder Analysis
Define Groups & Identity Stakeholders
Your first step in Stakeholder Analysis is to define stakeholder groups and then identify individual stakeholders.
Defining & Identifying
Define Stakeholder Groups
Review various groupings that are affected by the initiative to determine who your stakeholders are:
External affected groups
- Customers,
- Suppliers,
- Regulators, and
- Others
Organization
- Sponsors,
- Executives,
- Domain SMEs, and
- Others
Organizational Unit
- End users,
- Help desk, and
- Employees whose work will change because of the initiative
Solution Delivery
- Project team , and
- Anyone directly involved with creating the solution.
Additional groups for potential stakeholders:
Review existing documents, systems or artifacts
- Enterprise organization charts - to help identify affected organization units.
- Business model canvas
- customers,
- suppliers, and
- Regulators.
- Participants in process models that are part of the project.
- Business and system rules to highlight affected organization units and/or regulating bodies that impact how a process may be monitored, enforced or validated.
- Examine lessons learned from previous projects.
Talk to relevant people
- Conduct interviews with
- the project sponsor,
- the project manager, and
- any identified subject matter experts (SMEs) to help identify documents and additional stakeholders .
- Facilitate brainstorming sessions to identify potential groups to be included and start getting people to work together and think creatively.
Identify Stakeholders
Identifying stakeholders by asking:
- Who
- is responsible for the process inputs/steps/outputs?
- makes decisions regarding the budget/schedule/business requirements?
- funds the project?
- uses the end product?
- is responsible for creating the solution?
- is responsible for defining standards for the solution?
- will be responsible for the solution once it is implemented (project vs. operational)?
- Are there supervisors that will be informed by their own staff?
- Should the project communicate to all impacted supervisors and staff?
Identifying stakeholders can be done concurrently within the Define Groups task or separately.
For example:
- the Accounts Payable function needs to participate in the project and there’s only one person who focuses on Accounts Payable – so Define and Identify is one task.
- the Compliance Department needs to be informed and consulted, and there are two units with three people in each that are involved.
- You need to ask questions to see if all of the individuals need to be included or just one from each unit.
