Visualising and mapping stakeholder influence

At the outset of the programme, the team concentrated their efforts on getting the majority of their stakeholders - the management population - behind the idea of improving performance with large-scale presentations. They also collected data about how long processes took within the company and measured how many errors were made.

'The team pinpointed the problems,' van Doorne says. 'There was no interaction between the departments and scattered responsibility where nobody was responsible for an end-to-end process. Targets were not set by what customers wanted and thought were acceptable but were focused on meeting internal administrative goals, and management information, where it was available, represented only the work of individual departments and didn't reflect the end-to-end customer experience.'

The programme team identified another department that seemed to be pivotal for every customer-centric process, which was headed up by a specialist. 'He was brilliant in his field, but he was not a good process manager,' says van Doorne. 'We decided that the processes in his area needed to be industrialized.' Having a clear view of how the department operated and the key players within allowed the programme team to focus on influencing the relevant people. 'The programme manager started to influence the chief operating officer and the board, the project manager worked on the departmental manager. Other team members who were active in departments that were touched by the process also had a chance to express their views,' van Doorne says. 'As a company, we recently took the decision to appoint a process manager next to our specialist. Now the process can be run like a factory, which is better for the customers as we can track our performance and we know how to improve upon it.'

Van Doorne is very clear about how stakeholder analysis helped the improvement initiatives. 'Stakeholder analysis is a very powerful tool,' he says. 'The most important thing is that the analysis makes you aware of politics and positions and therefore you can influence people to get to your end goal.'

2. Nominate a key contact. From each of those groups, pick someone to be the key individual. Be careful who you choose. What are the internal politics of picking one over another? Your key contacts should ideally be people who are affected directly, with enough authority to make decisions about things that touch their departments.

3. Feel what's going on. Contact your list of named individuals and introduce them to the project properly, dispelling any myths they might have held. Get an accurate understanding of their position regarding the project, and validate the assumptions you made about their interest and influence in step (i).