How do I find stakeholders I have missed?

Ask two questions of every stakeholder you already have: who else could stop this, and who else will have to change how they work because of it. Then ask the answers the same two questions. The list converges within a few rounds, and the names that appear late are the ones the chart hid.

What is a power-interest grid?

A two-by-two sort of stakeholders by how much they can affect the project and how much they care about its outcome, used to decide how closely to engage each. It is a starting point for a conversation about engagement, not a filing system, and positions move.

How much of a project manager's time should this take?

More than most spend. Surveys of experienced managers put communication and engagement at the majority of their working hours on a healthy project, and the projects that skip it spend the time later, in recovery.

Stakeholder Management

Also: stakeholder engagement, stakeholder analysis, power-interest grid, stakeholder map

Stakeholder management is the practice of identifying everyone who affects or is affected by a project, understanding what each wants and can do, and engaging them deliberately so that the project keeps the support it needs and hears the objections while they are cheap.

Assessment. The stakeholder who sinks a project is almost never on the original list, because the list was drawn from the organisation chart rather than from the question of who can stop this. Ask that question first, then ask who will have to live with the result, and the map will include the people the chart leaves out.

Every project has people who can help it, hurt it, or be hurt by it, and most of them are not on the team. The sponsor who funds it, the department whose process it changes, the security team who must approve it, the union whose members' work it alters, the regulator, the customer, the finance director who signs the invoices: each has interests, and each can act on them. Stakeholder management is the deliberate version of what good managers do instinctively, which is to find these people early, understand what they need and fear, and talk to them in the way and at the frequency that keeps their support or at least their acquiescence.

Power to affect the project	Interest in the outcome	How to engage
High	High	Manage closely: regular, personal, two-way. These are the people who decide whether it succeeds.
High	Low	Keep satisfied: brief them enough that they never feel surprised, and no more.
Low	High	Keep informed: they care and will talk; make sure what they say is accurate.
Low	Low	Monitor: check occasionally that neither axis has changed.

The grid is a first sort, not a verdict, because positions move. A department head with low interest becomes highly interested the week the project changes their reporting line; a quiet compliance officer acquires power the day an auditor asks a question. The map is revisited at every stage boundary and whenever the project's scope or organisation changes, and the people on it are engaged according to where they now sit rather than where they were drawn in month one. The certification bodies treat this as a core competence: PMI's people domain is a third of its professional exam, PRINCE2 mandates a communication management approach, and IPMA assesses engagement as a behavioural competence rather than a document.

In practice

A finance system replacement maps its stakeholders from the organisation chart: the finance director, the IT director, the project board. It launches on time and is rejected within a month by the forty accounts-payable clerks whose daily screens it replaced without asking them, and by the auditors who find that a control they relied on no longer produces evidence. Neither group was on the map. The recovery project asks the two questions first, who can stop this and who has to live with it, and the clerks' supervisor and the audit manager become high-interest stakeholders with fortnightly sessions from the second week. The system that ships eighteen months later is functionally similar and is adopted, because the people who could have rejected it helped design it.

Two questions, asked twice

Who can stop this: the audit manager, whose control the new system broke. Who has to live with it: forty clerks whose screens changed without a conversation. Neither was on the organisation chart, and both were on the map the second time.

Often confused with

Project Charter: The charter names the sponsor and the manager. Stakeholder management identifies everyone else who matters, most of whom the charter never mentions, and the sponsor is only the first line of the map.
Change Control: Change control decides what happens to a request to alter the baseline. Stakeholder management is why the request arrived through a process rather than as a surprise, and why the decision is accepted afterwards.
Client Brief: A brief captures what one client wants from a piece of work. Stakeholder management deals with the many parties around a project, whose wants conflict and whose power to act differs, and the client is one of them.

Key takeaways

→Build the map from who can stop it and who lives with it, not from the organisation chart.
→Sort by power and interest to decide how much engagement each person needs, then re-sort as the project moves.
→The objection you hear in month two is cheap; the one you hear at go-live is the project.

Related concepts

RelatedProject Charter
Stakeholders are identified in the charter.

Where this concept sits in the field

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FAQ

How do I find stakeholders I have missed?: Ask two questions of every stakeholder you already have: who else could stop this, and who else will have to change how they work because of it. Then ask the answers the same two questions. The list converges within a few rounds, and the names that appear late are the ones the chart hid.
What is a power-interest grid?: A two-by-two sort of stakeholders by how much they can affect the project and how much they care about its outcome, used to decide how closely to engage each. It is a starting point for a conversation about engagement, not a filing system, and positions move.
How much of a project manager's time should this take?: More than most spend. Surveys of experienced managers put communication and engagement at the majority of their working hours on a healthy project, and the projects that skip it spend the time later, in recovery.

Sources

The primary text this definition rests on. Read it before relying on this one.

Project Management Institute, A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide), Seventh Edition (2021)
Mendelow, A. L., Environmental Scanning: The Impact of the Stakeholder Concept (1981)
IPMA, Individual Competence Baseline for Project, Programme and Portfolio Management, Version 4.0 (2015)

Last reviewed 13 September 2026 · Getting Digital

Stakeholder Management

In practice

Often confused with

Key takeaways

Related concepts

Where this concept sits in the field

Certifications that test this

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FAQ

Sources