Stakeholder Analysis is the ingenious process of carefully studying & analyzing your relationships with anyone who has a stake in your project, product, or idea. Unlike mapping, stakeholder analysis takes you a step further by helping you streamline your strategic responses in terms of engaging your stakeholders. This step adds a critical action element missing from a simple mapping exercise.
Implementing a thorough stakeholder analysis ensures that all voices are heard and the project aligns with stakeholder expectations. Kickstart your analysis with the presumption that each stakeholder is unique. This will help you craft tailored communication plans and engagement strategies to optimize project outcomes.
Example
A stakeholder can either have a financial stake in your work (like owning shares in your company) or a non-financial one, say, they want to give back to the community without expectation of financial returns, like profit or revenue. Both have different levels of interest in your project. Financial stakeholders, like investors or lenders, typically focus on budgetary concerns. In contrast, non-financial stakeholders—such as a philanthropist funding a new cancer hospital—may also examine the project’s scope and design to assess the tangible benefits it offers to cancer patients.
Another key distinction to draw is between external & internal stakeholders. External stakeholders can be anyone: from clients & customers, vendors, suppliers, and business partners down to random members of the public. Internal stakeholders, on the other hand, are people directly working on a project or product, usually in salaried positions based on their expertise & past work experience.
What We Bring To The Table
To help you kickstart your stakeholder engagement plans, we offer a free, 100% editable, preprogrammed Excel tool. For user ease, this template is available in multiple formats: XLS, XLTX, Google Sheets, and ODS formats, making it easy to customize and integrate into various workflows. We use basic Excel features like color-coded systems, drop-down menus, and simple grid layouts to help you systematically map out your stakeholders, assess their influence and interest, and develop tailored engagement strategies for them.
Use our template to:
- Add basic project info for building context & ensuring accountability
- Assess the influence of each stakeholder based on their potential impact and power
- Define dispositions to assess stakeholder attitudes
- Decide how often you must communicate with each stakeholder, and how
- Specify the current and required levels of commitment for each stakeholder
- Identify the main motivations or drivers for each stakeholder
- Predict & document any concerns they might have regarding the project
For detailed step-by-step instructions, check out our complete template manual here!
