So let's take a look at stakeholders as a program manager.
It's really important to manage stakeholders effectively a stakeholder is defined as anybody who is
positively or negatively affected by the program and the stakeholder might not know that your program
exists or how they're affected by it.
So it's really important for you as a program manager to identify the stakeholders and communicate with
them.
So you'll want to manage the stakeholders accordingly and to do this you can group them into different
categories.
You might want to group them into department type organization region audience type location or anything
like that then you're going to need to build trust with these stakeholders and you'll do this to have
in regular communication and we'll look at some communication priorities in the next section.
It's also important to point out that the program's sponsor is the most important stakeholder is the
person who is accountable for the program and who wrote the justification for the program in the business
case.
So this person you're going to need to keep regularly informed with the program's development so some
stakeholders will include people like owners business owners or board members such as the I.T. board
or customers people who are actually going to use the service or products managers such as the program
manager the individual project managers change managers operations managers etc. then you've got buyers
such as the procurement team or acquisition organization you've got suppliers suppliers of services
and products and you've got designers builders engineers testers developers and other project team members
and business support members and you've got users you've got users in representatives of user groups
and domain experts and you've got operation and maintainers and operational managers as well.
So the chart here shows the stakeholder influence two interest matrix you might see matrices like this
before this one is set out to identify which stakeholders you need to pay most attention to and ways
to communicate with them.
So on the very top right hand side we have the first quadrant which is the most important the one where
the stakeholders who have the highest level of interest and the highest level of influence.
These people that you're going to want to make sure you keep closely informed and this is probably the
program sponsor is going to live to the left of that.
You then got the stakeholders we have a very high level of influence but a lower level of interest.
So this might be someone like the chief executive you're going to want to make sure that they are kept
satisfied when they do want updates but you're not going to communicate with them as much or as regularly.
But make sure that you appreciate the fact that they have high influence but a slightly lower level
of interest than on the bottom row.
You have those stakeholders that have a lower level of interest you'll put less effort and time into
communicating and keeping them up to date.
So on the right hand side those that have a high level of interest but low influence you might let you
make a copy of the men to the highlight reports from the program or any of the reporting that you do
which is serves as a mechanism to keep people informed and on the left hand side.
You've got the lowest level of interest and influence.
So this is where you do your minimal effort.
This might be updates on to the company intranet or any of kind of publications that you do to keep
people aware of what's going on in the program.
So that's the stakeholder influenced to interest matrix.