In most of the ecosystems in which I have been able to intervene, the dependencies between teams and departments have been great sources of difficulty for the production of value. This is why from the start of a team, it now seems fundamental to me that it is well aware of all its stakeholders.
For this, I use a simple workshop – Stakeholder Mapping – which, as its name suggests, will allow the team to map all of its stakeholders. I propose in this article a description of the workshop as well as some examples to allow you to better understand it!
Functioning
In a very simple way, what we are trying to represent is all the relationships of the ecosystem under study.
We will therefore distinguish 3 elements:
- THE Subject : the team, the department, the service being studied
- Information : what transits, what is expected from one entity to another
- The Stakeholders: the team, the department, the service, the person with whom the subject is in relation
Animation
The animation of the workshop takes place in 3 stages:
1.Place the subject in the center.
2. List all teams, services, departments and people with which they will have to interact to achieve their objectives. We place these stakeholders all around our subject.
3. Define information flows between each of the parties.
Notes: we separated the information into 2 unidirectional streams to clearly differentiate their content. We could also add the name and contact details who to contact for each stakeholder.
The heart of the animation therefore takes place in the questioning of the various stakeholders and the exchanges of information that need to take place for everything to go as well as possible. Keep in mind that there is never a wrong answer because what really matters is the conversation that takes place during the development of this mapping.
Thus, I recommend that you plan between 1h and 2h of workshop to leave enough time for this exploration which will probably draw many other subjects! 😉
Examples
Here are some examples of results from Stakeholder Mapping workshops:
Example 1:
Here we quickly see the multiplicity and variety of actors involved:
- management: program, direction, tech, chapter lead
- other teams: Product Owners, Product Managers and Tech Leads as well as a Certification team
- other services: compliance, security, legal, purchasing
- expertise: designer, architect
The question that often arises is whether we separate certain specialties or whether we integrate them into a group of stakeholders.
There is no wrong answer either because it depends on what you want to visualize. For me, it's the type of information exchanged which will be decisive on the separation or not of the actors.
Note: the circle was initially intended to visualize the stakeholders who were closer (or the most solicited / soliciting) and those who were further away. This generated a number of exchanges and moves, which was the intended effect.
Example 2:
In this example, we can see that some stakeholders have been named in order to clarify the interlocutors. This can be easier to begin to visualize the role of each and the type of exchanges that can be had with people.
The workshop is also a good way to discover the organization : indeed, we can see on the right a breakdown of what we grouped behind “business teams”. These elements are the result of questions from newly arrived team members.
Conclusion
Stakeholder Mapping is now one of my essential workshops. Indeed, I find it particularly useful in its virtue of clarifying the ecosystem and identifying the critical axes of interaction, not only for the team but also for me as a coach. It can be integrated into a team kick off but also as a one-off workshop, pretext for good conversations.
It can easily be combined with a give and take matrix to consolidate interactions, but this time with stakeholders.
