Stakeholder Circle

In view of our need to establish trust with all of our stakeholders on the security and privacy of our systems and data, my priority is to ensure that we do it right, not just that we do it quickly.”
Kip Hawley

The Stakeholder Circle is a technique proposed by Dr Lynda Bourne as a means of visualising the impacts of various stakeholders for a given project.

An OSS project touches so many parts of a CSP’s business, but it is common to only engage a small sub-set of stakeholders during requirement gathering and internal change management planning. Whilst a little complex to understand, the Stakeholder Circle provides us with the means of identifying and prioritising the project’s key stakeholders as well as then developing appropriate communications plans and engagement strategies.

A blank Stakeholder Circle template can be found here.

This link provides a description of how to read the Stakeholder Circle Diagram.

Whether using the Stakeholder Circle or not, your project team should definitely conduct a Stakeholder analysis prior to undertaking requirement gathering on your OctopOSS so that impacts are well known and engagement methods can be planned in advance.

It should be noted that the Stakeholder Circle is for visualising Stakeholder influence rather than as a stakeholder management methodology.