Stakeholder Matrix

What this tool does

CM8-236 is a working stakeholder matrix for a project, a programme or any change that needs other people's cooperation. You map each stakeholder on the classic power–interest grid, record where they stand today and where you need them to be, write down what you will actually do about the difference, and print a quadrant-ordered engagement plan.

Projects rarely die of bad Gantt charts. They die because the Finance Director was never convinced, the supervisor whose job changes heard about it in the canteen, or the one person who could sign the budget was updated so rarely that they lost confidence. Stakeholder mapping is the discipline of noticing those people before they notice you — working out who can affect the outcome, who is affected by it, and matching the engagement effort to both. The matrix is not the work; it is the thing that stops the work being spread evenly across people who matter unequally.

Power and interest — the two axes

Each stakeholder gets two scores from 1 to 5. The words matter more than the numbers — score against the definitions, not against your feelings about the person.

Power is their ability to affect the outcome — through budget, approvals, people, expertise or opinion:

• Score — Power
• 1 — No influence over the outcome
• 2 — Minor influence — can slow things at the edges
• 3 — Moderate influence over resources or opinion
• 4 — Strong influence — controls budget, people or approvals
• 5 — Can stop or redirect the project

Interest is how much the outcome affects them — not how interested they act in meetings:

• Score — Interest
• 1 — Unaffected, indifferent
• 2 — Slightly affected, passing interest
• 3 — Noticeably affected by the outcome
• 4 — Significantly affected — their daily work changes
• 5 — Directly and personally affected

The distinction between interest and enthusiasm is the one people miss. A warehouse supervisor whose paper system is being retired has an interest of 4 or 5 however quiet they are in workshops — the outcome lands on them. Score the stake, not the volume.

The four quadrants

The grid splits at a fixed threshold — a score of 4 or more counts as high, on both axes, consistently:

• Manage closely — high power, high interest. They can stop the project and will live with its results. Engage frequently and personally: involve them in decisions, give them real meeting time, and never let them be surprised. This quadrant is where projects are won and lost, which is why the tool flags it.
• Keep satisfied — high power, lower interest. They could intervene but the outcome barely touches them. Keep them confident without consuming their time: concise updates, early warning of anything that strays into their territory. Spamming this quadrant with workshop invitations converts quiet goodwill into irritation.
• Keep informed — high interest, lower power. The outcome lands on them even though they cannot redirect it. Regular, honest updates and genuine involvement in the detail — their knowledge improves the result, and their energy is the cheapest advocacy you will ever get. Neglected, this quadrant writes the resistance stories.
• Monitor — low on both. A broadcast update is enough. The one job here is to watch for movement: a reorganisation, a promotion or a phase change can move someone into another quadrant overnight.

The threshold is a convention, not a law of nature. What matters is that it is stated and applied consistently, so two people looking at the same grid are arguing about the person, not the geometry.

Current and desired attitude

Position tells you how much effort a stakeholder deserves. Attitude tells you what the effort is for. Each stakeholder carries two readings on the same five-point scale — champion, supportive, neutral, resistant, opposed — one for where they stand today, one for where the project needs them to be.

The gap is the size of the persuasion job. One step — neutral to supportive — is usually a matter of involvement and a few good experiences. Two or more steps is a campaign: it needs a deliberate approach, several months, and often an intermediary the stakeholder already trusts. The gap chart shows how much of this work the plan is carrying.

Be sparing with "champion" as a target. Not everyone needs to advocate; most projects need one or two champions where the power is, and mere non-resistance everywhere else. A matrix whose desired column is all champions is a wish, not a plan. The tool will query a desired attitude below the current one — if you genuinely want someone less involved, keep the attitudes equal and reduce the contact frequency in the approach instead.

Writing the engagement approach

The approach field is where matrices usually go to die, filled with sentiments — "keep happy", "manage expectations", "maintain relationship". None of those is a thing a person can do on a Tuesday.

Write actions with a frequency and a mechanism: "Fortnightly working session on the finance module; design authority over the chart of accounts; parallel run across two month-ends agreed in writing." A good approach answers three questions: what will they experience, how often, and what are you conceding or offering that speaks to their key concern? That is why the concern field sits next to it — an approach that never mentions the stakeholder's actual worry is a schedule, not a strategy.

Give every relationship an owner — one name, not a team — and a next planned contact date. The tool flags contacts that slip, because relationship decay is silent: nobody notices the skipped update until the stakeholder mentions the project's problems to someone who matters.

Keep it confidential

This document records candid judgements about named colleagues — that the Finance Director is resistant, that a supervisor fears for their job. Written down and left in a shared drive, a line like that can end a working relationship and embarrass its author for years; stakeholder matrices have surfaced in email trails and meeting packs, and it is never pleasant. Keep the file to the one or two people who maintain it, print for specific conversations rather than circulating, and word even your private notes as observations you could defend — "concerned about month-end disruption" travels better than anything ruder. This tool runs entirely on your own computer with no account and no upload, which is precisely why it suits this job: the most useful stakeholder matrix is an honest one, and honesty needs privacy.

Reassessing the matrix

A stakeholder matrix is a photograph of a moving scene. People change roles, projects change phase, and attitudes move — sometimes because your engagement worked, sometimes because something outside the project soured. Reassess on a rhythm: monthly on most projects, after every phase gate, and immediately after any reorganisation on the stakeholder side. The status field is there so the register can admit what a spreadsheet never does — mark a row needs updating the moment you suspect your reading is stale, and inactive when someone leaves the scene rather than deleting the history.

At each review, three questions per stakeholder: has their position moved (power or interest), has their attitude moved, and did the planned contact actually happen? The tiles carry the resulting to-do list: gaps to close, contacts overdue, relationships without an owner.

FAQ

How many stakeholders should one project map? Between eight and twenty is typical. Fewer usually means groups are hiding inside labels like "the users"; many more and the review stops happening. Split a label into named people as soon as their interests differ.

Can a stakeholder be a group? Map a named person wherever one exists — a group cannot return your call. Where interests are genuinely collective, map the representative (as the sample does with the employee representative) and treat their constituency's concern as the key concern.

Should stakeholders see their own entry? No — and that is the strongest argument for keeping the file private. What they should see is the behaviour the entry produces: better-timed involvement, updates pitched to what they care about.

What if two people score someone differently? Good — that argument is the analysis working. Score against the written anchors, and if you still disagree, the disagreement usually means you are reading different evidence; go and get more.

Is power × interest a real number? It is an ordering, not a measurement. The tool uses it to rank who deserves calendar time, never to add or average across people.

One matrix or one per project? Keep rows per project — the same person can be a champion on one initiative and resistant on another, and a single merged row hides exactly the movement you need to see. The project field keeps them separable.

Saving your work

Stakeholders, settings and the report header are written to this browser's local storage as you type, and the toolbar shows the time of the last save. That storage belongs to one browser on one computer: another browser, a private window, a second machine or a clean-up tool that clears site data will not have it.

Treat Export .json as the real save — one file containing everything, which Import .json restores anywhere. Export CSV gives you the register for spreadsheet work. Reset asks twice, then erases everything this tool has stored. There is no undo. Given what this file contains, store exports where only you can read them.

Accuracy & disclaimer

Everything in this matrix is your reading of other people — power, interest and attitude are judgements, not facts, and they can be wrong in both directions. The tool applies the quadrant rule and the gap arithmetic faithfully to whatever you enter; it cannot tell you whether the Finance Director is really resistant or merely busy. Scores also go stale faster than most registers admit, which is what the status field and the review rhythm are for.

This is a planning aid for professional working relationships, not an assessment of anyone's worth, performance or character, and not HR documentation of any kind. Treat the file, its exports and anything printed from it as confidential working notes.