Stakeholder Engagement Assessment Matrix

Stakeholder technique · See it on the map

Runnable here

A table comparing a stakeholder's current involvement against the involvement a project actually needs from them.

When to use it

When a stakeholder register alone doesn't tell you what to do next: use this once you know who the stakeholders are and need a plan for closing the distance between where each one stands today and where the project needs them to stand.

When to avoid it

Don't run it before a basic stakeholder analysis exists — there's nothing to assess a gap against. And don't run it in driftless expecting to record the result: this product stores only interest and influence (each low, medium, or high) on the stakeholder record, with no current-versus-desired engagement field at all. A reader can work through the technique on paper, but there is nowhere here yet to capture what it produces.

Steps

1. For each stakeholder, mark their current engagement level: unaware, resistant, neutral, supportive, or leading.
2. For each stakeholder, mark the desired engagement level needed for the project to succeed.
3. Plot both on the same row and look at the gap, not just the current position.
4. For each gap, decide a specific action to move the stakeholder toward the desired level, sized to how large the gap is.
5. Prioritize action on the stakeholders whose gap is both large and high-influence.

What it produces

• A matrix of current versus desired engagement, one row per stakeholder.
• A prioritized list of engagement actions targeted at the largest, highest-influence gaps.

Common pitfalls

• Recording the assessment once and never re-plotting it, so a stakeholder who has moved from resistant to neutral still gets treated as an active blocker.
• Spending equal engagement effort on every gap instead of weighting by influence, which burns time on stakeholders who were never going to affect the outcome.
• In this product specifically: doing the assessment out of band and having no field to record it in, so the result lives in a spreadsheet nobody else sees.

Worked example

On a hospital scheduling rollout, the head nurse starts out resistant — she wasn't consulted on the pilot design — while the project needs her leading, since staff will follow her lead over any memo from IT. The gap between resistant and leading is the largest on the matrix, so the team schedules a working session with her before anyone else, rather than sending the standard rollout email to the whole department.

Source

• PMBOK-6 §13.4.2.3

Where it comes from: this technique is named by the PMBOK Guide, 6th edition.