How to create a stakeholder map for your project (Part 1/2)

Undertaking an ongoing and transparent process to engage all the stakeholders of a development project is a key element for making informed decisions and to achieve good governance. Part of this work relies on mapping the parties involved with a particular project, and defining an appropriate and inclusive format that promotes the active and ongoing participation of these stakeholders.

But how should you prepare a stakeholder map that meets the needs of the project and matches your capabilities as an executing agency? If you have also asked yourself this question or plan to start this activity in the context of your project, this article is for you! In this first blog entry, we will cover how to identify and classify stakeholders. In the next post, we’ll share how to develop a needs matrix and strategies for managing stakeholders.

Why invest in project stakeholder management?

Project stakeholders are individuals, groups, or organizations that may affect, be affected, or perceive that they will be affected positively or negatively by a decision, activity, or outcome of a project. The management of these stakeholders is of utmost importance for a project’s success, and includes processes such as:

• Identifying people, groups, or organizations that may affect or be affected by the project.
• Analyzing stakeholder expectations and their impact on the project.
• Developing appropriate management strategies to effectively engage stakeholders in project decisions and execution.

To note: the involvement and degree of influence of the stakeholders in a project are directly related to its execution time. At the beginning of the project, the stakeholders usually have a higher degree of influence and, as the project progresses, this level of influence diminishes.

Another aspect to consider is the cost that making changes entails for the project’s final budget. The graph below exemplifies the inversely proportional relationship between the influence and costs associated with changes throughout the project’s life cycle.

Changes are common in the context of projects and are often essential to ensure that the expected results can be delivered. However, they result in costs that, if extreme, can make the project’s execution unfeasible. For this reason, the project potentially benefits when changes in direction take place in the early stages of its realization, since the costs of their implementation are usually lower.

Some of these changes result from explicit requests and often complex negotiations with interested parties. Therefore, involving these actors in decision making as early as possible can facilitate setting expectations about the project across different sectors and prevent resources invested in the execution of certain solutions from being wasted when significant changes to the project are required.

Therefore, performing the stakeholder management properly can increase the probability of executing the project within the expected scope, schedule, and quality, and a stakeholder map is a useful and effective tool to help your project move forward with greater control of these dynamic variables.

We recommend following four fundamental steps to create the stakeholder map. Today we will detail the first two.

Step 1 – Identify Stakeholders

You can start by thinking about who will benefit from this project. To whom am I delivering benefits? Who should I consult with to find out whether the benefits are being planned according to the needs we foresee for this audience? Is the current or potential user of your service, equipment or functionality already clearly identified? The answer to these questions will probably already lead you to map some of your most relevant stakeholders.

Besides those who will receive direct and/or indirect benefits promoted by the initiative, another issue that will point you to important stakeholders is the expected generation of negative impacts by the project. Will any community have to be resettled for the project to take place? Are there foreseen environmental impacts of any nature that are related to specific groups that should be consulted, informed, or that should take ownership of the process of carrying out this intervention? Do the planned activities, in a positive or negative way, interfere with the type of resource use (or availability) that is already consolidated in the areas of direct and/or indirect influence of the project?

Last, but not least, the main topic of the intervention is likely to be of interest to civil society organizations active in the territory. What are the main issues that the initiative addresses? Which are the local organizations that represent these agendas in the community and that could contribute to the collective construction of the planning, execution and evaluation of your project?

You can use various techniques to carry out these activities: checklists, questionnaires, interviews, meetings with groups to apply participatory approaches, revisiting projects previously carried out with similarity to the scope intended by this intervention. The possibilities are many and should be explored in greater depth the more complex the project to be carried out is.

Step 2 – Develop the stakeholder classification matrix

Now that we have a very broad list of stakeholders potentially related to the intervention, it is time to understand how they relate to the project proposal. In what ways can the project benefit these stakeholders? Are they in favor or against the project? What are their reasons for wanting the initiative to succeed or fail? Can we convince them to change their mind? What is their level of influence in the organization? When we answer these questions, we are classifying our stakeholders.

Once we understand how these stakeholders interact and how much influence they have over the project, it is important to assess whether they support the intervention or oppose it—they may also tend toward neutrality. This assessment will allow you to identify how these stakeholders can collaborate with or hinder the realization of what has been planned, and to begin to identify good ideas for defining strategies to work with these actors.

In this context, some tools can be used to perform this categorization and mapping of stakeholders. The (1) Power x Interest, (2) Influence x Impact, and (3) Power x Influence matrices are powerful tools in stakeholder management, as they help in the assessment and prioritization of these identified stakeholders and allow the project team to design strategies addressed to the different groups. The result of the interaction of the factors in each matrix suggests the type of management to be done with each group, see below.

As noted above, each quadrant presents a strategy that must be adopted with the stakeholder. The executor must, for example, closely manage a stakeholder with high power x high influence. And why is this? Let’s say the project seeks to build a road with potentially significant impacts on the environment and local communities. To do so, the competent environmental agency must issue the corresponding environmental licenses, which depend on public consultations and obtaining support from the impacted community to finalize the licensing—a stakeholder classified as having high power and high influence over the process. In this case, failure to meet the expectations of these stakeholders can delay or even prevent the advancement of activities. That is why it is important to manage this stakeholder closely and, whenever possible, keep it satisfied. This strategy must mitigate possible risks that could occur in the project due to the dissatisfaction of this stakeholder. Thus, more inputs can and should, if necessary, be directed to meet the needs of the stakeholder classified in this quadrant.

Similarly, stakeholder classification will point out those actors that do not require significant resource investment for their management, and may only be kept informed and/or constantly monitored, so that you may adjust strategies in case of changes in the context that can increase these actors’ influence over the project’s direction.

A tip to obtain the greatest benefit from the use of this tool is to keep in mind that stakeholders may interact among themselves to strengthen their positions, whether favorable or unfavorable to the project. This interaction between influencers should not go unnoticed in the planning of stakeholder management strategies, mainly because it is a powerful factor in strengthening possible resistance to the project or, conversely, in facilitating mutual agreements that enable the realization of the project with the best possible distribution of expected benefits.

In our next blog post we will share the following two steps: how to prepare the needs matrix and strategies for managing stakeholders. Stay tuned!

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This post was originally published in Portuguese in the IDB’s Ideação blog.

Read part 2 of this series here.