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Lab 05 — Creating a Stakeholder Register

At a glance

Learning objectives

By the end of this lab you should be able to:

  1. Complete a stakeholder register with enough detail to drive real engagement decisions.
  2. Assign each stakeholder a current and a desired engagement level, and state the gap.
  3. Record what each stakeholder needs, in their terms rather than yours.
  4. Allocate decision rights for two specific decisions using a RACI.

Scenario

A teaching hospital is building an Appointment and Patient Portal. Patients will book, reschedule, and cancel outpatient appointments online, and receive reminders. Clinic staff will see their schedules and manage clinic capacity. The hospital's existing process is telephone-based, with a separate patient-record system that the portal must read appointments from.

The portal is sponsored by the hospital's medical director. The IT department will build it. Two external parties are involved: a software vendor supplying the reminder messaging service, and a patient-records administrator who controls access to the existing system's interface.

Facts about the stakeholders:

Stakeholder Position on the project What they need
Medical director (sponsor) Supports it; wants shorter waiting lists Evidence that the portal reduces no-shows
Head of outpatient services Cautious; her staff absorb the change Assurance that clinic capacity is not overbooked by the portal
Patients' association representative Strongly supportive; has campaigned for online booking A booking process usable by elderly patients and non-smartphone users
Clinic receptionists Worried about redundancy rumours Certainty about their role and training before go-live
Records administrator Neutral; controls interface access A documented interface specification and a security review
Messaging vendor Commercially motivated; wants the contract renewed Clear interface requirements and predictable delivery dates
Hospital data-protection officer Not yet engaged; will review A description of exactly what personal data the portal stores and for how long
Facilities and telephony manager Uninterested; owns the phone system being partly replaced Notice before any change to call routing
Project's own developers Delivery team Stable requirements and access to a test clinic

Your role

You are the project manager. The register will be circulated to the steering committee at the end of this week, and it must be good enough that other people can act on it without you explaining it.

Project information and assumptions

The scenario is part of the example-project library — read the full description there if you want the wider context.

  • The portal must integrate with the patient-record system; the records administrator can approve or block that access.
  • The reminders service is outsourced and paid per message sent.
  • The hospital's data-protection obligations apply to appointment data; confirm the specific requirements with the data-protection officer rather than assuming them.
  • The patients' association has already published a complaint that previous hospital systems were not accessible to older users.
  • No additional reception staff will be recruited.
  • Assume the appointment scheduling rules are documented somewhere, but that nobody has yet identified where.

Tasks

Task 1 — Complete the register

For each of the nine stakeholders, complete all columns of the Stakeholder Register template. Use the scenario facts; where a column cannot be filled from the facts, say what information is missing and who would provide it.

Task 2 — Rate power, interest, and attitude separately

For each stakeholder, record:

  • Power (high/medium/low) — the ability to affect the outcome
  • Interest (high/medium/low) — how much they care, now
  • Attitude — supportive, neutral, resistant, or unaware

Then state, for any stakeholder where power and interest disagree, what that means for how you manage them.

Task 3 — Assign engagement levels

Use the five levels — unaware, resistant, neutral, supportive, leading. For each stakeholder record:

Field Meaning
Current level Where they are today
Required level Where you need them to be
Gap and action What you will do to close it, and by when

At least four stakeholders will have a gap. Be specific that closing a gap upwards costs effort, and state what you are doing about the ones where you decide not to close the gap.

Task 4 — Decision rights for two decisions

Choose two decisions from this list and complete a RACI row for each, naming people by role:

  • Changing the appointment rules that the portal enforces
  • Approving the user interface design for patient-facing screens
  • Approving the interface access to the patient-record system
  • Signing off the reminder message wording and timing
  • Accepting the portal for go-live

For each row, state in one sentence why the Accountable role is the right one — and why it is not the project manager.

Task 5 — Write the register's "so what"

Write a short section titled "What this register tells us" containing:

  1. The stakeholder most likely to block the project, and why.
  2. The stakeholder whose support you must borrow, and how.
  3. The stakeholder you have deliberately chosen not to invest in, and the consequence you accept.

Deliverable

A completed stakeholder register as a table or a filled copy of the template, followed by your engagement-level assignments, two RACI rows, and the "What this register tells us" section.

Hints and guidance

  • Separate attitude from power. A supportive stakeholder with low power does not decide; a neutral one with high power does.
  • A register without actions is a list. Every gap needs an action with an owner and a date, or it will not close.
  • The data-protection officer is the classic "not yet engaged" stakeholder. Their interest arrives late and their power is high — the cheapest action available is early engagement.
  • Not everything deserves attention. Saying "monitor, and accept the risk" is a legitimate decision. Saying nothing is not.

Self-check criteria

Check How to verify it
All nine stakeholders covered Count them; none omitted
Power, interest, and attitude recorded separately Three distinct columns, not one combined score
Engagement gaps have actions Each gap names an action, an owner, and a date
A non-closure decision is stated explicitly At least one stakeholder is deliberately not pursued, with the accepted consequence
RACI has exactly one Accountable per row Count the As; more than one means the decision has no owner
The "so what" section names names No generic statements such as "all stakeholders are important"

Reflection

  1. Which stakeholder did you find hardest to rate for interest, and what would you need to know?
  2. You chose to close four gaps. Which gap, if left open, would cost the most — and how would you justify closing the other three instead?
  3. Why is the project manager almost never the Accountable role for accepting the system?
  4. The receptionists are worried about redundancy, which is above your authority to resolve. What can a project manager legitimately do about it?
Model discussion points
  1. Usually the facilities and telephony manager: genuinely uninterested today, but the owner of an asset the project partly replaces. The information that resolves it is whether call routing changes are in scope, which decides whether their interest is low or merely latent.
  2. The head of outpatient services, because her staff deliver the new process — the portal can be technically perfect and fail operationally. Justifying the others is easier because their interests can be served by information rather than by change.
  3. Because acceptance is a judgement about whether the business can operate the system and whether its risks are acceptable, which is a decision for the owner of the consequence. The project manager is accountable for producing the evidence that supports it.
  4. Be honest and specific about what the project does change, escalate the staffing question to the sponsor as a decision for the hospital, and avoid making promises the project cannot keep. A project manager who stays silent while rumour fills the gap has created a resistant stakeholder out of an anxious one.

Extension challenge

Add a stakeholder influence map showing which stakeholders affect each other, not just the project — for example, the patients' association influencing the medical director. Then identify one stakeholder you could use as an indirect route to another, and write the one-paragraph approach you would take. Explain why the indirect route is sometimes more effective than direct persuasion.