Stakeholder engagement involves identifying those who may be affected by or can influence project decisions, and actively involving them through a two-way process of providing information and seeking input. It is important for effective decision making, building trust, and reducing potential conflicts or issues. Key tools for stakeholder engagement include identifying stakeholders and assessing their interests and power over the project, creating matrices to define roles and responsibilities, and visualizing dependencies to help manage relationships between teams. Regularly reviewing engagement tools helps ensure all important stakeholders are involved and potential blockers are addressed.

1. Stakeholder engagement
Rohela Raouf

2. Introduction
• What we are planning to cover:
• what is stakeholder engagement
• why you should do stakeholder engagement
• tools and techniques that are available for stakeholder engagement

3. What is Stakeholder Engagement? !
It’s the process by which we
involve people who may be
affected by the decisions we
make (wikipedia)
Or who can influence the
implementation of our
decisions

4. 🚨Not communication
Communication is different from engagement!
Important that we understand the difference between communication and
engagement
Engagement:
• two way process
• It provides information and
seeks input
• It involves listening and talking
Communication:
Tends to be one way, an
individual or team will impart a
piece of information to another
team/ individual.
Vs

5. WHY
Why should you do Stakeholder Engagement-
• Reduce conflicts and issues
• Save time and money
• Effective decision making
• Build credibility and trust

6. 6 stages of stakeholder engagement
Set engagement objectives
Identify and assess stakeholders
Develop engagement plan
Implement engagement plan
Evaluate results
Adjust and correct

7. Engagement objectives
As a team you should ask yourself:
• What do you want to achieve both from the
customer and business perspective?
• Which Stakeholders do you need to get involved

8. 🛠Tools to use
• Possible tool to use at this stage of Stakeholder Engagement
• Elevator Pitch: communicate what the team is trying to achieve
• Meet the neighbours: who the team needs to engage with in order for their project to
be a success

9. Elevator Pitch⏱
FOR- who is your
target audience
WHO- statement of
the needs or
opportunity
THE – product
name
IS A – product
category
THAT- key benefits
UNLIKE –
competitive
alternative
OUR PRODUCT-
statement of
primary
differentiation

10. Meet the neighbours 👫
• Project community is larger than you think…
• A neighbour is anyone or anything external that interacts with your project.
• This tool is about getting you and the team thinking ahead of time about who you are going to want to meet
and establish relationships with before going live
• Examples:
• Security
• Technology
• Policy
• Legal
• Systems
• Processes

11. 🔎Identify and assess stakeholders🔍
• You will need to drill down your list of stakeholders that you created in the
previous step
• Decide who are your key stakeholders
• What is the level of power that these stakeholders have on your project
• What is level of interest that these stakeholders have in your project
• This will then help determine which groups and individuals require the most
effort

12. Power and Interest Grid

13. Power and Interest grid
• This model identifies stakeholders based on their power and interest in the project.
It allocates the stakeholders to one of the categories:
• High power, interested people: these are the stakeholders you need to fully engage with
your project and make the greatest effort to keep on your side.
• High power, less interested people: these are tricky stakeholders, as you have to put
enough work with them to keep them satisfied but at the same time you do not want them
to get bored with your message
• Low power, interested people: keep these stakeholders informed to ensure that no major
issues arise. These stakeholder can be very helpful with providing details to your project.
• Low power, less interested people: again, monitor these stakeholders, but do not overload
them with excessive communication.

14. RASCI Matrix

15. RASCI Matrix
• RASCI is an acronym that stands for Responsible, Accountable, Support, Consulted and
Informed.
• A RASCI chart is a matrix of all the activities or decision making authorities undertaken in
an organisation set against all the people or roles.
• Responsible: Responsible for the work to be completed, this may be the person who actually does the
work or directs others to do the work
• Accountability: Individual whom has the authority to approve the task
• Support: Individual/team whose service or co-ordination is needed
• Consulted: Individual/s with technical expertise i.e. Subject Matter Experts whose input add value for
ultimate implementation
• Informed: Individual/s who need to know/ be informed about the status/results of the work, the
decisions that were made and who depend on the deliverable

16. Check your RASCI Matrix
• Individuals with no empty spaces: they have too much work allocated to them.
• Tasks that have lots of ‘R’s: are there too many people involved in this to get
the work done on time?
• Tasks that have lots of ‘C’s: too many people being consulted is going to slow
the work down.
• Tasks that have lots of ‘I’s: can you create a rule that says people are only
informed by exception i.e. when they need to know that something deviates
from plan? This will save you time communicating when everything is going
as expected.
• Finally check for blank spaces. Every task should have a Responsible and an
Accountable person. You don’t necessarily need to have people being
Supportive, Consulted and Informed for every task but if you have a lot of
gaps here then it could be a sign that you’ve missed some stakeholders

17. Dependency Spider
Team
Team A
Team B
Policy
Security
Legal
Data

18. Dependency Spider
• Dependency Spider is used by the team to understand the dependencies or any
blockers that the project has due to other teams within the organisation
• Team needs to add PostIt Notes to the diagram when they identify that another
team could be a blocker for them.
• This is a good visual tool for the team to help them identify the blockers that they
are facing in the project. The team should go through these blockers on weekly
basis to identify how they are planning to resolve them
• By having a visual reminder on a daily basis you are more likely to try to resolve
blockers/dependencies then if it was on a document that no one would see.

19. Dependency Board
Team Name Sprint 1 Sprint 2 Sprint 3 Sprint 4 Sprint 5
Policy
Legal
Team X
Team Y
Operations
Team Z

20. Dependency Board
• When a team discovers that they need something from another team (in order to begin their own
work), they add a Red PostIt note to the Dependency Board.
• If there is a dependency where there team are unable to complete their work because they need
to something from another team then they add Yellow PostIt note to the dependency board
• If the blockers are linked together then there should be connected either via a string or a line on
the board
• The board is regularly reviewed by the teams, for instance during the sprint. Once a red note has
been resolved the connected yellow post-its is removed as well
• The dependency board can help teams to plan, slice features, foresee needed technical
collaboration, as well as finding alternative ways of helping each other

21. Examples