Stakeholder Map · Power-Interest Grid
Stakeholder Mapping · Power-Interest Grid
What is a stakeholder map?
- Four cells on two axes: influence and interest
- High influence, low interest is the biggest risk
- Update at each phase, since the landscape shifts
Once you use this tool well, what changes isn’t the sophistication of your analysis but the recipient list of your weekly report email. It settles who gets invited to the kickoff, who only receives a one-page summary, and who gets a check-in once a quarter. Your time and materials for persuasion are limited, so the premise is that communication is a question of allocation, not total volume.
The quality of the map depends on how you read the axes. Reading influence as job title gets it wrong; the practical test is whether this person can stop the initiative: Are they in the budget approval chain? Do they hold a veto? Can they release headcount? Interest, likewise, is not about goodwill but about how far the initiative touches that person’s KPI or their department’s workload this year. Score each on a 5-point scale with 3 as the dividing line, and you get four quadrants. A RACI chart divides up who holds accountability for the work; this grid also covers people not directly involved in the work and ranks your communication priorities.
Cell placement alone is often not enough, so in practice teams overlay each person’s stance (supportive, neutral or opposed) in color. An opponent with high influence and high interest is someone to persuade, but a supporter in the same cell is a spokesperson who can speak for you in meetings. Even in the same cell, the right approach can be the opposite. Positions also aren’t fixed, so every reorganization, budget approval or personnel change means redrawing the map.
The most common mistake is turning this map into a file and sharing it. The moment a team lead sees their own name in the 'Monitor' box, someone who was never a concern becomes your firmest opponent. Keep the named ranking in the project owner’s notes only, and bring it to meetings only as a communication plan. The other mistake is reading low interest as a safe signal. An executive with low interest is not a supporter but someone who simply hasn’t looked at this yet, and two weeks before launch, a single "Who decided this?" can undo three months of preparation.
John KimInstructor John Kim, author of “B2B Marketing Design” and CEO of Nanum Consulting
Jinho DanAccounting instructor who makes financial statements, costing, and tax easy to understandIt originated in R. Edward Freeman’s stakeholder theory in the 1980s and became established in project management practice as the power-interest grid. It is also included as a stakeholder analysis technique in PMI’s project management body of knowledge.
Let’s look at a hypothetical case. Company A, an auto parts manufacturer with 1,200 employees, wanted to reintroduce its mandatory company-wide information security training. Two years earlier, the same course stalled at a 41% completion rate, and the cause wasn’t the content but a lack of cooperation from the production division. A three-person training team had six weeks to get approval from the management meeting.
- The training team lead wrote 14 stakeholders on a whiteboard by their actual names rather than by department. Once they were written down, it became clear that opinions were split even within the same production division.
- Influence was scored out of 5 by asking “Can this person stop the project?”, and interest by asking “Is it tied to their KPIs this year?” The head of production scored 5 for influence and 1 for interest, while the information security lead scored 2 for influence and 5 for interest.
- For the CFO and the head of production, who fell in the influence 5 / interest 1 cell, we sent only a one-page status update once a month. In return, we first brought them a design for a 15-minute mobile module with no line stoppage. The head of production said, “As long as you don’t stop the line, I have no reason to object.”
- The information security lead and four on-site safety managers, who had high interest but no approval authority, were grouped as a pre-review team. After three internal leak incidents were added to the course material, they were the first to explain it at department briefings.
- Right after the budget was approved, a reorganization replaced the head of production, so the map was redrawn. The new head’s interest rose to 4, so the kickoff announcement was changed to an internal notice issued in the head’s name.
- Approval came in one pass within six weeks, with no rejections. Three months later the completion rate rose from 41% to 93%, and the number of production-floor employees who had not completed training fell from 470 to 61.