The Stakeholder Engagement Assessment Matrix

– See All Project Management Key Concepts –

The Stakeholder Engagement Assessment Matrix - PMBOKThe Stakeholder Engagement Assessment Matrix

The Stakeholder Engagement Matrix is a very useful tool, and it supports the comparison between the current engagement levels of your stakeholders and the desired engagement levels required for successful project delivery.

It asks and answers the question – how engaged do we need our team, or the people around the project, to be to ensure successful project delivery?

There are five different levels through which we can measure this stakeholder engagement. First of all, we’ve got Unaware, then Resistant, then Neutral, then Supportive and then Leading. Let’s look at them in a little bit more detail.

Stakeholder Analysis

An Unaware stakeholder is when they’re unaware of the project completely, or its potential impacts. They simply don’t know that it exists.

Now if they’re Resistant, they’re aware of the project and its potential impacts but they’re resistant to any changes that might occur as a result of the work or the outcomes of the project. These stakeholders will be unsupportive of the work or the outcomes of the project, and we really need to communicate more and manage the relationship for those particular stakeholders.

We might have Neutral stakeholders, where they’re aware of the project but they’re not supportive and they’re not unsupportive. They’re just going with the flow.

We might have supportive stakeholders, where they’re aware of the project and potential impacts and they’re supportive of the work and its outcomes. This is ideally where we want to be leading to and ultimately the next step is when we’ve got stakeholders Leading, where they’re aware of the project and its potential impacts and they’re actively engaged in ensuring that that project is a success. They’re really helping us out, they’re not hindering us. And that’s where we really want our stakeholders to be.

A stakeholder engagement assessment matrix involves mapping our stakeholders against those descriptions. We might have stakeholders over here on the left where are they are currently (C) unaware, but we actually need them to be supportive as our desired state (D).

Most of them really need to be supportive or leading. An executive might need to be leading, or a sponsor might need to be leading, so we need to really make sure that we’re communicating properly and helping get them up into those upper levels of stakeholder engagement.

Current and Desired Stakeholder States

The gap between the current (C) and the desired (D) state for each stakeholder will direct the level of communications necessary, and to effectively engage that stakeholder so do we need to communicate a lot more, in a way that’s best for that stakeholder. Now we really need to use those soft skills that a project manager has to have, to increase the engagement of those project team members or the the other members around the project. The closing of this gap between the current and desired is an essential element of monitoring stakeholder engagement. You will definitely be using this in your project management career, and you will also see it as part of the questions for the PMP and the CAPM exams.

And that is the stakeholder engagement assessment matrix.

– David McLachlan

– See All Project Management Key Concepts –