Making a stakeholder map

A learning journey

Introduction

Once upon a time, I started a new role as a design trainee on a team which managed the design system for the NHS website and those building digital services for the NHS. We had a lot to do, one of which was a stakeholder map and there was a lot I learned doing this project.

I thought it best to share my experience as it unfolded, the benefits we found and what I learned as a trainee designer. I hope this helps someone out there as well.

The problem

The team had been repurposed to work on emergency projects at the onset of the pandemic, so when I joined, everything was in a ‘soft reboot mode’.

A major question that came up during our planning was ‘How do we better engage with our stakeholders?’. The problem was we couldn’t answer the question, because we didn’t know our stakeholders well enough.

This prompted the need to identify all our known or unknown stakeholders

So why is it important to do this you ask? Well because it helps us to:

1. Define our relationships properly
2. Understand who we needed to engage with more
3. Find opportunities to expand on the relationships we had or did not have

So, we proceeded to make a stakeholder map to get a lay of the land.

The First Map

Our first attempt was to leverage our existing team knowledge and layout all the stakeholders we knew on a graph using sticky notes. This was then plotted on a matrix chart by how much interest and influence each stakeholder had on our product or service.

The first map we arrived at which charted our known stakeholders by power & interest

We also added labels to each sticky note which contained information on the stakeholder behaviour type to allow for easier sorting.

This first map was able to show us:

1. Most of our known stakeholders
2. The degree of their influence on our product and service
3. Which ones we needed to engage with the most and least

Once we had this, we put in motion an engagement priority list and strategy.

The Second Map

While the first map gave us indication of a path to follow, a lot of questions remained.

1. What did our relationship with each stakeholder look like?
2. What relationship did each stakeholder have with each other?
3. What opportunities were available?

To figure this out, I had to do a lot of research into how to do a stakeholder map properly and gather more insights into the stakeholders we had yet discovered.

Learning stakeholder map — This led me towards textbooks, articles, videos, speaking to our head of design (Tero Väänänen) and the head of Interaction Design at Government digital services UK or GOV.UK (Tim Paul) among many available resources. I also adopted one of GOV.UK’s design community principles of ‘building on what exist’ and was kindly helped by Tim Paul to get a template of their own stakeholder map.

The stakeholder map from GOV.UK which formed the base template used to build ours. Created by Ignacia Orellana

With this template, I was able to create a map of our own stakeholders and used it as a tool to gather more insight.

Gathering insight — With the map made from the GOV.UK template, I was able to discover the stakeholders we did not know. This led me down the path of speaking with the team, speaking with some of our identified stakeholders and also looking at the project dependencies on our front-end kit downloads on GitHub.

We got a better sense of how our landscape looked, which differed from the one GOV.UK had made. Our relationship existed on three rings, one which was within our NHS website programme, the wider NHS Digital organisation, the wider NHS bodies and outside the NHS but building services for the NHS such as private companies. Unlike the three-behaviour axis (Use, Assure, Contribute) from GOV.UK, we identified a fourth which was the axis of ‘Influence’.

This led to a context fit version of the map template I had borrowed from GOV.UK design system team.

The stakeholder map in its current state as the basis for more research. Created by David Hunter & Tosin Balogun

I then used the map to engage with more identified stakeholders to:

1. Validate it
2. Spot gaps
3. Spot opportunities

The Outcomes

What did we gain from doing this? Well, the map helped us:

1. Get an increased awareness of our team and services
2. Get a shared understanding of the landscape among our team
3. Onboard new members to our team better
4. Identify opportunities where our community could contribute to our design system

What next?

At the present period, the plan is to continue to engage more stakeholders with it, gather their feedback and iterate the map, rinse and repeat.

What did I learn?

I learnt many things from doing this project, but my biggest learning was that you cannot make a stakeholder map without the stakeholders.

There is always a danger with design where you want to go into a cave and create some magic but for a stakeholder map, this will not work because what you create in the cave will come across as an imposed understanding on your stakeholders.

Ensure you involve the stakeholders earlier in the process, whether it be via a workshop or a 1–1 session. Even if the map is a rough draft, it does not matter, the earlier you do, the better the shared understanding and co-ownership of the map becomes.

The biggest value of a stakeholder map is perhaps in doing it and not the output of it.