A stakeholder is rarely affected by only one project. The resident who has to deal with a renovation, also with a permitting process, and perhaps also with a reorganization at the party next door to him. Whoever scores impact per project separately counts a small number three times and misses that the sum for that stakeholder is large.
Impact is not the same as influence. A resident has little influence over the outcome of a decision, but can be heavily impacted by its consequences. Conversely, a regulator can have a lot of influence while the direct impact on him personally is limited. Whoever merges these two axes into one score loses the distinction needed to determine what kind of attention a stakeholder needs. More on these two axes and how they relate to each other can be found at what is an influence-impact matrix.
Scoring impact is about the question of how much something changes for this stakeholder, not about how much power he has to do something about it. That difference is decisive with multiple ongoing projects, because influence often stays comparable per project while impact accumulates.
If three projects are scored separately from each other, a distorted picture emerges. Project one scores the resident as having limited impact. Project two does too. Project three does too. None of the project teams sees a reason to give extra attention. But the stakeholder himself experiences three times the hassle, three times the uncertainty, three times a different point of contact. The sum of limited, limited, and limited is, for the person undergoing it, often not limited.
To make this visible, impact must be viewed at the stakeholder level, not the project level. This means there must be an overview in which the same stakeholder recurs across projects, with a score per project and a combined picture alongside it. How exactly that score is built up and what it depends on is described at how do you score impact.
As soon as impact is added up across projects, a different question arises: who is responsible for that stakeholder as a whole. Project one has a project leader, project two has another, project three yet another. None of them has the full picture, and none of them has been assigned to guard that picture.
This is the moment at which a relationship needs an owner who stands apart from an individual project. Not to replace project leaders, but to follow the stakeholder as a person: what has been said before, what has been promised, and what the combined impact of all ongoing matters is. Who takes on that role and how that role relates to the project structure is worked out at who becomes the owner of a relationship when there are multiple projects.
Without that owner, there is a risk that three teams independently promise something to the same person, without any of them knowing what the others have already said. A small commitment that is consequently not honored costs more trust than a large investment that fails to materialize. How a commitment is recorded so that this kind of overlap becomes visible before it goes wrong is described at how do you record a commitment.
A combined impact score tells what is coming at a stakeholder as seen from the organization's perspective. It does not tell what that stakeholder thinks about it. That distinction is fundamental: scoring impact is an assessment by management, not a statement about the stakeholder's own experience. That experience only becomes clear once the stakeholder expresses it himself, in a conversation or in a survey intended for that purpose.
The score described here is therefore an internal instrument for determining priority, not a substitute for actually asking the stakeholder how he feels about it. It is a way of seeing where one's own attention needs to go, not a way of knowing what is actually going on.
If the same stakeholder appears in multiple projects, the timelines of those projects also converge. A commitment from project one may have a deadline that falls right before a decision moment in project two. Whoever does not see this because the projects are managed separately from each other runs the risk of missing a deadline at a moment when the stakeholder is already under pressure from something else. Who monitors these deadlines when multiple projects are running at the same time is explained at who monitors a deadline.
This page is about scoring and about ownership of a relationship. That is one part of the Trust Baseline: an internal survey alongside an external stakeholder survey, where the difference between those two pictures is the first outcome. In addition, there is a commitment tracker and a signal rhythm, so that commitments and deadlines are not only recorded but also followed up.
This tool is under construction. Whoever wants to work with this already can sign up for the waiting list; nothing finished is being offered at this time.
Scoring impact and assigning ownership are tasks that consist of fixed steps: gathering data, combining it, and repeating as soon as a project changes. Whoever wants to know which part of this kind of recurring work can be taken over by AI can have this calculated with the werkscan of FTE TO AI, which indicates per task what lends itself to that.
Vraag maar. Het interessantste antwoord komt meestal van wie u nog niet heeft gesproken.
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