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Want a successful technology selection? Make sure you understand your stakeholders.

Whether the end game is a new web content management system for the entire enterprise, or a marketing automation platform for your sales and marketing team, or a collaboration tool for the PMO, identifying who the project’s stakeholders are, and how they fit into the effort is an important task to complete early on in the selection process. After all, if you don’t understand who will be tending to the platform, as well as who will be using the new tool and how, then it will be virtually impossible to find a solution that fits their needs.

We have created a Stakeholder Analysis spreadsheet to help you out. This easy-to-use tool can help simplify and add clarity to understanding project participants by laying out information about all your stakeholders such as:

  • Who they are: name, title, work location.
  • How they are impacted and/or will impact the project: their interest in the effort, their area of expertise, their relevant history – are they an advocate or someone that needs to be brought onside.
  •  What role they will play in the effort: PM, project sponsor, interviewee, focus group participant, general audience for updates.

By laying out all possible stakeholders at the outset you can ensure that there is representation from all the relevant factions (business units, departments, geographies, tenure, levels of employees and management), and identify what project role they will play. Getting the lay of the stakeholder land will help:

  • Plan what research efforts – individual interviews, focus groups, surveys – will be the most effective to ensure sufficient stakeholder input.
  • Set a realistic timeline and budget for the research. Are all stakeholders in one location? Or if not, will the PM travel to the stakeholders to get their input or will sessions be run remotely?
  • Identify if approval from any potential participants’ managers is required, before asking them to be part of the project team or process.

Having a comprehensive annotated list of stakeholders will ensure that input is collected from all affected areas of the business, that the requirements collected are comprehensive, and help garner support for the product and/or team that is ultimately selected.

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions on how to use the tool, or about your technology selection.

Download your copy of the Stakeholder Analysis tool here.


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