Stakeholder map: who has to agree, and who only has to know

Projects rarely fail because the work was wrong. They fail because somebody with the power to stop it found out late, or somebody whose agreement everybody assumed turned out never to have been asked. A stakeholder map is the cheap defence: a list of the people around the work, sorted by how much they can affect it and how much they care, with a decision about how each one is handled.

What a stakeholder map records

• The person, their role and what they actually control — budget, access, sign-off, or simply the ability to make things difficult.
• Their interest in the outcome, which is not the same as their authority over it.
• What they need from you: a decision, a consultation, or a notification.
• Who owns the relationship on your side, so it is somebody's job rather than everybody's.
• Their current position — supportive, neutral, opposed, unknown — and when you last checked.

The four quadrants, used properly

High influence and high interest get managed closely: involved in decisions, told first, consulted before anything changes. High influence and low interest are the dangerous quadrant — they are not paying attention until the moment they are, and the entire discipline is keeping them satisfied enough that they never become interested for the wrong reason. Low influence and high interest should be kept informed, because they are often the people who will have to live with the result. Low on both gets a monitoring line and no effort. The common error is treating interest as the axis that matters and spending the budget on enthusiasts.

Record position as unknown when it is unknown. A map where everybody is marked supportive is a map nobody has tested, and the assumption that silence means agreement is the single most expensive one on a project.

Keeping it honest

1. Build it with two people, not one — individual maps reflect individual blind spots with remarkable precision.
2. Name the person, not the department. Departments do not sign things.
3. Write what each stakeholder wants in their words, not in yours.
4. Review at every phase boundary; influence shifts when budgets and reorganisations do.
5. Keep it private. A document ranking colleagues by influence is not one you want forwarded.

What to do with it afterwards

A map that only exists at kickoff is decoration. The useful output is a communication plan with names against it: who hears about this first, who is consulted before a change of scope, who gets the monthly note. That plan is also the thing a new project manager needs most on their first week, and it is almost never written down — which is why the second-most-common failure is the handover where the relationships were never transferred.

Ettex Contacts suits the register side: people with role, owner, the handling decision and the date their position was last checked, kept private to the project team. Where the output is a running communication plan rather than a one-off map, it belongs next to the project record so it is reviewed with everything else.