Categorize the stakeholders

- When you're a project manager, you'll have a lot of people who are interested in your work. People will be interested in how the project affects them, they'll also be interested in some of the decisions you make. Some of these people will be your stakeholders. A stakeholder is someone who believes that the project has an affect on them. This belief could be real or imagined. Your communication plan will have a list of stakeholders in a stakeholder register. It's simply a list of everyone who has a stake in your project. For larger projects, you'll have a stakeholder management plan. This is a detailed look at how to work with the stakeholders in your project. It builds on your stakeholder register. The first step in your stakeholder management plan is to categorize your stakeholders. When you categorize your stakeholders, you don't categorize them as individuals, instead you'll need to categorize them as roles. I once worked on a large healthcare project. There were doctors, insurance companies, patients, and administrators. To categorize them, I needed to identify their roles. So I didn't put names like Dr. Johnson in my stakeholder register, or list out a company like ABC Insurance. Instead, I just created roles like lead doctor and insurance partner. These roles simplify the stakeholder register. All doctors and insurance companies should have similar communication needs. Remember that with your communication plan, you're trying to streamline your communication. So if you've put in individual names in your register, then you'll need to know the person to understand their needs. You'll want to lump together as much communication as you can into one group. That way, you won't send a lot of updates to people with different criteria. So once you have your roles in your register, you should categorize them based on their communication needs. For that, you should use the P3I technique. You want to list out their power, impact, interest, and influence. Power is pretty much what it sounds like. It's the ability that this role has in the organization to influence others and decisions. So you might see that executive management roles usually have a lot of power. Impact is different from power. In many projects, you won't have access to executive management. Instead, you'll be working with someone who updates the executives, like an executive assistant. This person might not have that much power, but they'll provide the resources for the people that do. Stakeholders will also have different levels of interest in your project, so you want to categorize your stakeholders by their interest level. A stakeholder might have power but very little interest. The head of human resources might be very powerful, but they probably won't be thinking much about your project. Finally, there are your stakeholders who have influence on your project. These are the stakeholders that you'll work most closely with. Each of your stakeholders should be categorized using this P3I technique. It will make your register much more useful and is a key part of your stakeholder management plan.