Mapping stakeholders, and planning what they hear
The power/interest grid is easy to fill in. The two columns that predict trouble are attitude and owner, and both are usually blank.
The grid is the easy part
Power and interest place someone in a quadrant, and the quadrant suggests an approach: manage closely, keep satisfied, keep informed, monitor. All of that is straightforward and none of it distinguishes an ally from an opponent.
A supportive stakeholder with high power is an asset to be used. An opposed one in the same square is a risk to be managed. They sit in the same box and need opposite plans.
The combination that stops projects
High power, opposed, and nobody owning the relationship. It rarely announces itself — the objection arrives late, in a meeting nobody expected, from someone who was never asked and has been quietly unconvinced for months.
Naming an owner does not solve it, but a blank in that column is the finding worth acting on.
Everyone a priority means nobody is
Manage closely is expensive: real involvement in decisions, genuine two-way communication. No project can do that for fifteen people.
When the top-right quadrant fills up, the map has stopped being a plan and become a list of people it would be politically awkward to place lower.
Purpose is the field that matters in a comms plan
Audience, channel and frequency are easy. Purpose requires a decision, and it is the one left as "to update stakeholders" — a description of the activity rather than a reason for it.
A communication with a stated purpose can be judged: is it still achieving that? One without runs until somebody cancels it out of frustration, about a year after it stopped being useful.
Uniform cadence is a smell
When every line of a communication plan says "weekly", it was filled in rather than thought about. A sponsor may need fifteen minutes a month and a clear escalation route; a delivery team needs something daily; a regulator needs something precise and rare.
The map goes stale
Power and interest both move. Someone uninterested today becomes intensely interested the moment the project touches their area, and power shifts with a reorganisation you did not hear about. Revisit at each phase boundary.