Prioritize the stakeholders

- As a project manager, you'll never hear anyone say, take your time. Instead, you'll probably get a lot of, as soon as possible, or ASAPs. So how do you communicate with everyone ASAP all the time? The short answer is, you don't. Instead, you'll need to prioritize your communication with a Power and Interest grid, this grid is for you, and not for your stakeholders, so don't share it. It shows who gets the highest priority when communicating. The Power and Interest grid has four quadrants. Starting at the top left-hand and moving clockwise, there are the high-power, low-interest stakeholders and high-power and high-interest stakeholders. These are the top stakeholders you'll need to prioritize. The bottom right quadrant has the high-interest, low-power stakeholders, these are usually stakeholders outside of your project. They might be bloggers or people in the media. They're powerful in other areas, but not a high priority for your project. The bottom left quadrant has low-power, low-interest stakeholders, these are the stakeholders that are barely connected to the project. They should have the lowest priority in your communication plan. Low-power, low-interest stakeholders are usually barely connected to your project. They might be the end users that are only interested in your project if the website is down. So take the time to decide, which stakeholders go into which quadrant. Now that you have your stakeholders in your Power and Interest grid, you can use it to build out your Stakeholder Register. The Stakeholder Register is a ranked list of all of your stakeholders. There should be a column in your register called Priority. This is where you'll create your communication priority label. So take each quadrant in your Power and Interest grid and write your communication goal for each of these four quadrants. This goal becomes our label. The top left quadrant has your high-power, low-interest stakeholders, you'll want to keep these stakeholders satisfied, so this usually means that you want to send them just enough communication to keep them in the loop. So in your Stakeholder Register plan, you'll label them Keep Satisfied. In the top right quadrant, you'll have your high-power and high-interest stakeholders. You'll want to manage their communication closely. This is usually quite a bit more than just keeping them in the loop. You'll want to make sure that they have copies of all your reports and access to all the project information. I might use Manage Closely for my label. The bottom right quadrant is the low-power, high-interest stakeholders. The stakeholders should be just informed about your project, this usually involves a lot of one-way communication. Inform is a good label for these stakeholders. Finally, you'll have the bottom left quadrant. These are the low-power, low-interest stakeholders. They'll be the lowest priority stakeholders. You'll need to monitor them to make sure they don't become higher priority stakeholders. So we could label them Monitor. So now that you have your four labels to prioritize your stakeholders, you can then update the register with these labels. I've done it with the most commonly used labels, but you can use whatever you want. Just make sure that the label is meaningful. These labels should be laid out in your communication management plan. This will then become part of your larger project management plan.