As soon as an organization runs multiple projects at the same time, scoring influence stops being an arithmetical exercise. A stakeholder who plays a limited role in project A can be decisive in project B. Anyone who scores influence per project separately misses the picture of the stakeholder who is involved a bit everywhere and, added up, therefore carries more weight than someone who is loudly present in one single place.
The problem is not the scoring itself, but the adding up. Influence is not a fixed characteristic of a person or organization; it shifts with the subject, the moment, and the other parties at the table. With a single project that is manageable. With multiple running projects a grid emerges: the same stakeholder turns up in several places, with varying influence and varying degree of being affected. The question how do you score influence is about the method; with multiple projects there is the added question of how you set those scores side by side without one blurring the other.
In addition, influence differs from being affected, and that distinction becomes sharper the more is going on. A party with little influence can be barely affected in one project and heavily affected in another. Anyone who does not keep these apart treats everyone with a network as important, whereas it could just as easily involve someone who simply sits directly in the outcome. How these two axes relate to each other, and how that differs as more projects run at the same time, is described on the page about how you score being affected when multiple projects are running.
An influence-affectedness matrix is not a table you fill in once and then set aside. With one project, the matrix is a snapshot. With multiple projects it becomes a collection of snapshots that must be laid side by side, and that is where things go wrong: a stakeholder who stays just below the line in every snapshot can end up above the line in the stack as a whole. What an influence-affectedness matrix precisely measures and where the limit of that instrument lies is explained at what an influence-affectedness matrix does and does not show. It is a classification, not a prediction of what a stakeholder will do or think.
With one project, ownership of a stakeholder relationship is usually clear: the project leader has the contact. With multiple projects touching the same stakeholder, a different problem arises. Three project leaders can each have part of the contact without anyone overseeing the whole. The stakeholder then experiences three separate conversations instead of one relationship, and he notices that difference sooner than the organization itself does. Who becomes owner of the relationship in that situation, and at what level that choice is made, is a question that remains unanswered more often than it should. See who becomes owner of a relationship when multiple projects run at the same time for the ways in which that ownership is usually assigned, and where it gets stuck.
A matrix with multiple projects also lays several lines of commitments side by side. A commitment made in project A can create an expectation that carries over into project B, without the second project leader being aware of it. That is one of the reasons why a small commitment that is not kept counts more heavily than a large investment that falls through: the stakeholder remembers the promise, not the project in which it was made. How you record a commitment so that it remains visible across projects is set out at how you record a commitment so it does not drop out of sight. Who monitors a deadline when that same stakeholder appears in multiple projects is a separate question; that is addressed at who monitors a deadline when a stakeholder appears in multiple projects.
The matrix says something about the relationship between what management estimates and what is actually going on within the organization itself. It says nothing about what a stakeholder actually thinks, even if that stakeholder appears in five projects at once. That only becomes clear when the stakeholder says so themselves, in an external survey. What the matrix does offer with multiple running projects is a structure for seeing where influence piles up, where ownership is lacking, and where a commitment risks disappearing between two project teams.
The Trust Baseline, with the matrix, the commitment tracker, and the signal rhythm, is currently being built. Anyone who wants to work with it once it is available can join the waiting list; there is nothing yet to order or try out.
Multiple projects with overlapping stakeholders also mean multiple people entering scores, updating matrices, and laying commitments side by side. Part of that work is repetition: finding the same stakeholder again, retyping the same data, asking the same question again to a different project team. Whether and how much of that work can be handed over to AI depends on the task itself. FTE TO AI's work scan calculates per task which part of it can be taken over by AI, without promising a percentage or outcome in advance.
Vraag maar. Het interessantste antwoord komt meestal van wie u nog niet heeft gesproken.
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