Understanding audit
stakeholders
explains how stakeholder mapping can help to ensure your audits succeed
One of the challenges in auditing and assessment, as with many professions, is understanding not only your customers but everyone else who may be interested in what you are doing, the outcomes of your work and how they may accept your recommendations or actively oppose what you are doing. Audit stakeholders might include the commissioning manager, the manager of the area being audited (and all their subordinates), other managers who think they might also get audited and the quality manager in the organization.
A useful tool in understanding stakeholders and predicting what they might do is the stakeholder map, which creates a visual representation of the likely opposition or support of what you are doing in comparison with the power they have to enact that opposition or support.
Understanding stakeholders
The first stage in mapping out your stakeholders is to spend time understanding them. The more information you can get on them, the more accurate a map you can create and the more effective a strategy you can build to influence them.
Once you have identified your stakeholders, ask: ‘What are they really interested in?’ With audits, it may be looking good and not having extra work to do or it may be improving the company. How they perceive the audit will significantly affect whether they will support or oppose your work.
Some people will actively support your work, putting their necks on the line and doing what it takes to help it succeed. Others will work the other way, vociferously seeking to scupper your efforts. These active people are where much focus often happens.
There may also be a silent, passive majority who are more difficult to classify. These may be in gatekeeper positions, where rather than taking positive action, they can subtly support or oppose the change by allowing things to happen or quietly blocking and hindering progress.
In the middle are the fence-sitters who neither support nor oppose the change. They are often playing a waiting game, looking out for what is actually going to happen. Other fence-sitters are simply undecided. Some people decide quickly while others need more reflection or persuasion.
Either way, one of the most important things about fence-sitters is their numbers, which can be very significant. Work hard to convert them and you may well win the game.
Stakeholders all have power, whether it is the formal power invested in a position of authority or it is the social power of being able to persuade others to support or oppose what you are doing.
Those with higher power are likely to be your most useful supporters or most dangerous opponents. So power analysis helps you prioritize your focus on stakeholders.
Building the map
Build the map by first analyzing your stakeholders as above then plotting them in the map below, writing their names in the relevant box. A way of doing this in a team is to write the names down of the stakeholders on post-it notes and sticking them up on a big chart on the wall, as in figure 1.
Figure 1: Plotting stakeholders
The question after you have identified the current positions of people is how to use and move them. Usually this means moving them on the chart, which you can show with arrows, as in figure 2. However, this movement usually has a cost, at least in terms of your time and effort. You therefore need to seek what movement you can create at what cost and hence find the best alternatives for action.
Figure 2: Influencing stakeholders
Stakeholder mapping in action
I worked once with an organization where attention to quality was limited and audits and other assessments were seen as painful and of little value. However, one senior manager thought they could be useful tools for improvement and we worked together to map out the other senior managers and key individuals to determine who would be likely to support or oppose building an explicit improvement framework around audits. The stakeholder map helped us work out who we needed to convert and who might be our early adopters in using the new approach. It was still not an easy journey but the mapping put us on the right road.
About the author
David Straker, MCQI CQP, is a consultant. He also runs knowledge-sharing website www.syque.com and is the author of Changing Minds: In Detail
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