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w01 l02 stakeholders and communication
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Who actually decides?
You framed the gap last lesson. Now you need to know whose agreement makes it real. Not who attends the meeting — who can stop the work, and who has to live with the result.
The org chart is not the map
Formal authority tells you who signs. It does not tell you who is consulted before signing, who quietly vetoes by never providing data, or whose team absorbs the change on Monday morning. Those people rarely appear on the distribution list and reliably determine whether the thing works.
Four questions that find the missing people
- 01Whose work changes if this succeeds? Follow the process downstream, not the reporting line.
- 02Who currently owns the workaround? Every broken process has someone quietly holding it together, and they know more than anyone.
- 03Who has said no to something like this before? Prior objections are cheaper to surface than to rediscover.
- 04Who controls a resource we need — data, access, a system, a budget line?
Analysing what you found
A list of names is not analysis. Two axes do most of the work: how much influence someone has over the outcome, and how much they are affected by it. Where a person sits determines how you engage them — and mismatching that is how projects burn goodwill.
Partner. These people decide and live with it. Involve them in shaping options, not in approving a finished recommendation. Bringing them a completed answer reads as being managed.
Keep satisfied. Often finance, legal, or a governance board. They can stop you and have no stake in the detail. Give them the decision and the risk, not the journey.
Consult and protect. Frontline staff whose day changes. They cannot approve anything and will determine adoption. Under-consulting here is the single most common cause of a technically successful, practically ignored solution.
Inform. Keep them current at low cost. The mistake is over-communicating here because it feels productive, while the group above goes unheard.
Knowledge check
The scheduling clerks will use the new system daily but have no say in selecting it. How should you engage them?
Communication planning without the template
A communication plan is not a table of meeting cadences. It is a set of commitments about what each group will hear, when, and through whom. The test is whether someone reading it can predict what lands in their inbox next month.
- Every stakeholder placed on both axes, not just listed
- At least two people identified who are not on the org chart
- Each group has a named messenger, not just a channel
- One feedback signal defined per audience
Knowledge check — select all that apply
Which of these belong in a communication plan?
Meridian: who is in the room?
The capstone brief contains three emails. Read them again with this lesson in hand and notice who is copied, who is not, and who is described in the third person by someone speaking on their behalf.