Stakeholder Mapping: Know Your Customer Before You Chase Value

You must know your stakeholders before you can focus on value, because value can only be understood stakeholder by stakeholder and service by service. In The Journey to Service Excellence, John Sansbury recommends a simple stakeholder map: a spreadsheet with stakeholders on one axis, services on the other, and the value each service provides in each cell.

• Not knowing stakeholders is costly. Sansbury describes an Irish utility whose IT department kept pursuing low cost long after the business wanted to pay more for better quality, because there had been no direct engagement in years.
• Consumers hold three roles: customers define requirements and take responsibility for outcomes, users use the service, and service sponsors authorise the spend.
• Build the map in three steps: identify stakeholders, understand which services are relevant to whom, and determine how to maximise each service's value. Segment the business, have each segment nominate a customer, and use a clear service definition such as the catalogue.
• Describe each cell in business outcomes, qualified by criticality, frequency and primary focus such as accuracy, timeliness, cost or quality. The map underpins SLAs and value stream mapping.
• Engage frontline and support centre staff, who usually know best how value can be increased, and use the map to make deliberate trade-offs about what not to do well.