Stakeholder analysis

From wiki.dpconline.org
Jump to navigation Jump to search
Bit rot artefacts present in a digital image!

A stakeholder analysis requires you to identify anyone involved in the work you plan to undertake, or anyone it will have an impact on. You may not need to include all of your analysis in the business case but it is important to have worked through the details as it will provide a crucial steer on many aspects of your business case.

Process

1. Identify who your stakeholders are.

  • See the resources section below for help in defining your list of stakeholders.
  • Also in the resources section below there are links to stakeholder analysis for digital preservation case studies.

2. Identify project champions and your key sponsor.

  • These are people who will support your business case. It is important you have discussed the rationale and implementation details with them.

3. Identify stakeholders from whom further buy-in is necessary.

  • In other words, who are the people who you may need buy-in from for this project to be a success and how engaged are they already?

4. Identify the users of your digital assets, and their requirements.

5. Identify other people in your organisation who will contribute to the implementation.

  • E.g. metadata staff, IT staff, curators.

6. Identify the interests / stakes for all your stakeholders.

7. Map level of interest against level of influence.

  • This will help you to understand the level and type of communication necessary for each group.

8. Depending on the complexity of what you are trying to do, you may want to create a plan for engagement and communications with each of your stakeholders.

Content

It is unlikely that you will need to include your stakeholder analysis within your business case, but check whether your organisation has specific requirements for this. You may want to include a simple list of stakeholders to illustrate you have considered the stakeholder requirements and impact.

Scenarios

An example of how stakeholder analysis helps to build momentum ....

An endemic problem in digital preservation is the multiplicity of involved stakeholders. It's not unusual to find responsibility distributed among collection managers, archivists, subject specialist curators, IT department, records managers and many more. This can make it difficult to gain momentum and make it easy for the responsibility to slip. This problem is amplified in large institutions where the lines of communication between departments and sections can be long and overloaded. In one case recently a major museum identified 16 different departments and groups with a direct interest in digital preservation: Audio Visual, Photography, Art Curators, Conservators, Archivists, IT Department, Records Managers, Research, Education, Collections Management, Documentation, Visitor Research, Communications, Marketing, Librarians as well as a large project team who were generating their own large archive. The result was a significant number of competing priorities and a significant potential for miscommunication.

The stakeholder analysis was really important to identify each of these. An invitation was sent out to all departments for an open meeting which allowed each of the sections to register an interest and discuss an outline plan for practical action. Notes from this meeting were used to support the business case for digital preservation and the meeting gave rise to an advisory board drawing from all the relevant departments.

Resources

GeoMAPP Business Planning: Developing Materials to Get Stakeholder Buy-in

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/fundingopportunities/projectmanagement/planning/stakeholders.aspx

http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/infokits/project-management/stakeholder-management

Power/Interest Grid http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/worksheets/PowerInterestGridDownload.htm