Stakeholders, roles and responsibilities

Projects are made by people. You can have the perfect plan, the right budget and the best technology, but one damaged relationship, one misunderstanding or one piece of information that doesn’t reach the person who needed it is enough to compromise the most promising project. That is why a PM’s first job isn’t on the calendar: it is on the map of the people.

Who the stakeholders are

They are all the people, groups and organisations with an interest in the project or an influence over it, inside and outside the company: the client and their bosses, the team, suppliers, end users, sometimes competitors or regulators. Analysing them means understanding their expectations, needs, motivations and potential conflicts, and deciding how to involve them.

The analysis has four phases:

1. Identify every actor, including indirect ones, taking into account influence, power, access to resources and possible resistance to change.
2. Map the relationships: who influences whom, where there are alliances, conflicts, balances of power. This is where you discover the real decision-makers and the real obstacles.
3. Understand interests and expectations of each one, through interviews, conversations, documents.
4. Decide the actions: how to involve each one, with what communication, how to handle conflict.

It is not a one-off exercise. People change roles, priorities, moods; the map needs updating.

The power-interest grid

The most widely used tool crosses two questions: how much power does this person have over the project? How much do they care about it? The grid, made popular by Colin Eden and Fran Ackermann, gives four strategies.

	Low interest	High interest
High power	Keep satisfied. Informed of the main decisions and results, without overloading them. Occasional, concise, fact-based communication	Manage closely. Actively involved, with frequent, direct, personal communication focused on benefits and risks
Low power	Monitor. Little attention, occasional and brief communication about results achieved	Keep informed. Listen to them and give feedback. Regular, informal, participatory communication

The communication plan grows out of the grid: for each key person, what they need to know, how often and in what way. For example: the marketing director only wants to see milestones and strategic decisions, at the steering committee; the brand manager approves the outputs and joins the weekly alignment; her assistant is the day-to-day operational contact, by phone and email.

The RACI matrix

If the stakeholder map says who matters, the RACI says who does what. For each task or decision:

• R, Responsible: whoever actually does the work;
• A, Accountable: whoever answers for it and gives final approval. Only one;
• C, Consulted: whoever contributes beforehand; communication goes both ways;
• I, Informed: whoever needs to be kept up to date afterwards.

Task	R	A	C	I
Creative concept	Art director	Creative director	Copywriter, graphic designer	Project team
Market research	Marketing manager	Marketing director	Art director	Project team
Sketches	Graphic designer	Art director	Copywriter	Project team
Prototype	Web developer	Art director	Marketing manager	Project team
Testing and review	Project team	Creative director	Client	—

Three quick checks: every row has one A only; every row has at least one R; the Cs aren’t so many that everything grinds to a halt. And a warning: the RACI is a starting point, not a cage. It clarifies roles, but it must leave room for autonomy and adapt when the project changes.

Information asymmetries

An information asymmetry exists when one party knows more than another: the client more than the supplier, the manager more than the team, one department more than another. They can be vertical, between hierarchical levels, or horizontal, between people or departments at the same level. They aren’t always a problem; they become one when they breed mistrust, opportunism, mistakes.

Inside the team, not everyone needs to know everything. But everyone must always be clear on four points:

• the overall status of the project;
• the status of the tasks they are involved in;
• any change that may affect their work, even later on;
• who does what.

With the client, asymmetries shrink when you share complete, up-to-date information on timing, costs, risks and changes; use understandable language, without jargon; set up regular reports, tailored to what the reader actually needs; and involve them in the decisions that concern them.

Hierarchies, systems and people

“Hierarchy” has taken on a negative meaning, but it needn’t. Donella Meadows, in Thinking in Systems, describes it as the way every complex system organises itself into subsystems: the original purpose of a hierarchy is to help its parts do their job better. Problems arise when the goals of one part override those of the whole: what Meadows calls suboptimisation.

In projects it happens all the time: the department defending its own budget at the expense of the result, the supplier optimising its own delivery rather than the shared one. The answer is balance: enough coordination towards the common goal, enough autonomy for each part to work well.

With difficult stakeholders

When many people come from the client side, and some are difficult, it helps to assign each of them a point of reference in the agency, who follows them and picks up their mood and requests. The PM stays free to keep an eye on the overall climate and step in where needed.