Stakeholder Map Example: A Filled-In Map from an HR System Replacement

The example

The programme replaces separate HR and payroll systems at four manufacturing sites in two countries with a single platform. Eleven months of delivery, one implementation partner, roughly 2,300 employees moving onto the new payroll. The map below is the version taken at week 22, a fortnight before formal consultation closed.

Influence and interest are scored high, medium or low. Stance uses five values — blocker, sceptic, neutral, supporter, advocate — recorded twice: as it is now, and as the programme needs it to be by go-live. The project, the sites and the people are invented.

Reading the example

Stakeholder and area

Most rows are individuals, because relationships are held by people rather than departments. Two are not: the line managers appear as one entry of roughly ninety, and the works council appears through its chair. A group entry is a compromise — it says the programme treats that population as a single audience with a single owner, and it hides any variation inside the group.

Influence and interest

These are the two axes behind the familiar four-box grid. High influence and high interest sits at the top; low influence and high interest sits at the bottom. The pairs worth looking at twice are the mismatches. The Head of Information Security has high influence and low interest, which is the profile that produces a late objection at a design gate. The line managers have the reverse, which is the profile that produces noise the programme can hear but the SteerCo cannot.

Stance now and stance needed

Two columns rather than one. Recording only the current stance produces a map that nobody acts on; recording the target makes the gap visible. The gaps in this example are the Site A payroll manager (blocker to neutral), the Finance Director (sceptic to supporter) and both employee representatives (sceptic to neutral). Note that the target for the works council chair is neutral, not advocate. Consultation partners are not supposed to be advocates, and writing that down stops the programme claiming a win it will not get.

Relationship owner

One name per row, and the name is the person who actually has the conversation, not the person who is accountable in the abstract. Four owners cover fourteen rows here. When one owner ends up holding nine or ten relationships, the map has stopped being a plan and started being a list.

Engagement

The mechanism and its frequency, in the same cell. The value of writing it this way is that it can be checked against a diary. Quarterly site visits and on-request design authority reviews are the two entries here that will not survive a busy month, which is a fact the map states rather than solves.

Last real conversation

A date, and it means a conversation rather than an email or an attendance record. Three rows are more than a month stale at week 22: Internal Audit, the Site C director and Information Security. Whether that matters is a judgement; the column exists so that the judgement is made with the dates in front of you rather than from memory. The Stakeholder Tracker uses the same field for the same reason.

What this example leaves out

It is a snapshot, not a history. There is no record of what stance each person held in week 4, so a map on its own cannot show whether engagement is working. Keeping earlier versions, or adding a movement column, is what turns it into evidence.

It also holds no messages. What each stakeholder needs to hear, from whom and when, belongs in a communications plan alongside it — the map identifies the audience, the comms plan carries the content. The Project Charter and Kickoff Pack keeps the two next to each other for that reason.

There is nothing here about decision rights. Influence is not the same as authority, and a stakeholder map will not tell you who signs a change request or who can stop a go-live. Those sit in the governance structure and the steering committee reporting that follows from it. Nor does it record what each person wants from the programme, which is usually the most useful thing anyone learns in the first conversation and the thing most often left in a notebook.

Finally, it says nothing about what happens when a stance moves the wrong way. A supporter who becomes a sceptic in week 30 is an event; whether it becomes a risk entry, a SteerCo item or nothing at all is a decision for the programme, and it is made outside the map. Programme governance is where that route gets defined.

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