Free Stakeholder Map Maker

A stakeholder map answers the first question every project has to settle: whose opinion of this work actually matters, and how much effort does each person deserve? The power–interest grid (often credited to Mendelow) settles it with two axes — power over the outcome running up, interest in the outcome running across — and four resulting quadrants that each carry a standing engagement strategy.

The map's value is in its brutality. Effort spent engaging low-power, low-interest stakeholders is effort taken from the top-right quadrant, where the project is actually won or lost. Teams that skip the exercise default to engaging whoever is loudest — and the loudest stakeholder is rarely the most powerful one.

This studio draws the real instrument: a shaded quadrant grid whose tint deepens toward "manage closely", edge axes running low to high with no invented numbers, editable strategy captions in every quadrant, and an attitude colour on every mark so the grid shows not just who matters but which of them are with you.

Manage closely (high power, high interest): these are the people whose expectations define success. Engage them individually and continuously — they should never learn anything important about the project from someone else's update.

Keep satisfied (high power, low interest): a finance director who can kill the budget but doesn't care about the details. Give them concise assurance that things are under control; over-communicating detail here actively annoys the one audience you cannot afford to annoy.

Keep informed (low power, high interest): end users, support teams, enthusiastic customers. They can't block the project, but they feel its effects first and talk about it most — honest regular updates here are cheap and buy the project its word-of-mouth.

Monitor (low power, low interest): a watching brief, nothing more. The one obligation this quadrant carries is re-checking it — the whole point of revisiting the map is catching the stakeholder who quietly moved out of it.

List generously before placing anyone. The stakeholder who derails a project is usually the one who never made the list — facilities, legal, the auditor, the union rep. Brainstorm names first, prune later.

Score power and interest separately and relatively. It is easier to agree "the CFO has more power than the vendor" than to defend "the CFO is an 8". If you have workshop scores, paste them straight in — any scale fits onto the grid — then argue by dragging, which is the productive part.

Add attitude last, and honestly. The temptation is to mark everyone a supporter; the map only earns its keep when the powerful resistor is drawn in red where the steering committee has to look at it.

Treat the finished grid as confidential. A chart that labels named colleagues "low power, monitor" or "resistant" is an internal planning tool — share the strategies it produces, not necessarily the map itself.

The stakeholder map is the input; the communication plan is the output. Each quadrant translates directly: manage-closely stakeholders get one-to-one cadences, keep-satisfied gets the executive summary, keep-informed gets the newsletter and the demo, monitor gets nothing until the next review.

Pair it with the project's other one-page instruments: a RACI matrix to assign task responsibility once the map has told you who holds power, and a risk register where your high-power resistors almost certainly deserve an entry each.

Re-plot at every phase gate. Attitudes move most at the moment a change becomes real — the neutral department head who becomes a resistor at rollout was visible one map earlier as a drift across the grid, which is exactly the early warning the exercise is for.