Stakeholder Management in Knowledge Management

In a previous posting I discussed communications plans and how they are used. In this post I would like to expand on that post and move into the area of stakeholder management and how you communicate with stakeholders. You can download the white paper on communications plans here.

I sometimes think the first step in engaging stakeholders is to start out by thinking of the various steps that you want to move them through. I have found that the eight levels of transformation model to be particularly useful in helping me to visualise the steps that you have to move them through. In the version of the transformation model that I typically use the steps are; first contact, awareness, understanding, acceptance, trial, adoption, embedded in process and eventually embedded in the culture. The pace at which individuals, teams or companies move through these stages varies considerably. For example it's not unusual for a team to move from first contact to trial in six months but it can take five years to go from contact to embedded in the culture as in the case of BP Drilling, highly successful practitioners of knowledge management.

You might consider producing a chart illustrating the pace at which you might want them to move through the various steps.




In order to move them through these various steps you might want to start to think about how you’re going to communicate with them. One of the tools that I like to use is the RACI matrix which stands for responsible, accountable, consulted and inform. Using this matrix I plot the names of the key stakeholders against whether they are responsible or whether I just need to inform them. Let me try to illustrate this by an example.




In the above example we have identified four different stakeholders all of whom have to be communicated with in some way. But we have also identified a critical difference between each of the stakeholders. This table illustrates that while A Johnson is responsible for leading and executing the activity, C Edgeware is the person who is actually accountable and who approves the output of the activity. It also illustrates that D Betterware only has to be informed about the activity. Thus the way in which we communicate both in terms of style and content will be very different in the case of C Edgeware and D Betterware as the latter only has to be informed whereas the form has to approve. The amount of effort that we put into designing the message and how we communicate it will be considerably greater in the case of the person who has to approve versus the person with whom we are only informing.

I will expand on the point made above in a forthcoming Knoco White Paper on stakeholder management. You will be able to download that from the Knoco website in a few days time. It will also have better illustrations.


Knoco Ltd