Prioritizing Stakeholders

  Stakeholder Management   ProjectsAtWork  

Busy project managers must prioritize their time and energy when working with stakeholders. This can be accomplished by using a simple matrix to gauge their impact on your projects, based on attributes such as power, interest, influence and knowledge. Here, we will focus on power and interest.

Without a prioritization plan, the project stakeholders who complain the most are likely to get the most attention. This is not a strategic way to allocate time. The project manager should not allow the stakeholders to dictate how much time is spent with them. Instead, the project manager must make crisp decisions on how much time to invest in each stakeholder.

With a prioritization plan, project managers will understand how to deploy their time. Let’s look at two key stakeholder attributes: power and interest. If we take power and interest and put them into a simple two-by-two matrix, it might look something like the representation in the figure below.

We’ll discuss this chart starting with the top right quadrant. This quadrant shows the stakeholders who have a high degree of power and a high level of interest. In other words, stakeholders in this quadrant have a high level of authority and also a high level of concern about the project outcomes. As depicted in this two-by-two matrix, the project manager should manage these stakeholders very closely.

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