Project Discovery Template

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Stakeholder Map & Goals and Assumptions Activity

One of the first elements about a project is understanding the needs of your stakeholders–– your stakeholders are the people who are directly affected by the outcome of the project. This activity can be done within your project team, or you can also invite some key stakeholders to this fun workshop session in order to better understand their needs, goals, and any assumptions about the direction of the project.

Why should you run this activity?

To the scope of the project
Understand any goals that the stakeholders have in mind
Recognize any fears and challenges the stakeholders may have

Step 1: Agenda

Prepare an organized plan that details the time-split for each part of the workshop. We also have a little arrow created on the side that functions to keep the participants on track and updated on what portion of the workshop everyone is working on.

Step 2: Ice Breaker

This is to get everyone comfortable with using the tools in Miro.

Step 3: Stakeholder Identification

We have created a template with prompting questions for outlining some internal and external stakeholders. Not all projects require both internal and external stakeholders, in which case one section can be left blank. This activity is designed to help you outline which users you need to keep in mind when coming up with a project solution.

*Tip: we recommend taking a screenshot of the sticky notes in each section before they are moved for the next activity. This is a helpful practice for activity documentation*

Step 4: Stakeholder Categorisation

Once you’ve outlined the different stakeholders, you can now organize them based on any common categories that stand out.

Step 5: Stakeholder Prioritization

This activity further categorizes your stakeholders. Even within stakeholders, you have certain stakeholders that you need to directly interact with and there are other stakeholders that just need to be kept in the loop. This is to further understand whose needs are a priority.

Step 6: Goals and Assumptions

Understand what it is that the stakeholders aim to achieve from this project. This will help you create metrics for how success is measured. Next you need to understand what potential fears or challenges the stakeholders expect. This will outline the direction of the project, and what to stay away from. Finally, you need to understand what the stakeholders need for this project to succeed. This is helpful in understanding if the stakeholders have a potential direction or process for the project in mind.