Who can stop this?
The grid is the easy part. Attitude is the column people leave blank, and a powerful opponent with nobody managing the relationship is how projects get stopped late.
Power, interest, and the column everyone leaves blank
The grid is easy. Attitude is what predicts trouble, and a powerful opponent with nobody managing the relationship is how projects get stopped late.
Stakeholders
The grid
Gaps in the engagement plan
How placement works
Anything above the midpoint of your scale counts as high. Four quadrants follow: manage closely, keep satisfied, keep informed, monitor.
Attitude is tracked separately from position, because it changes what the quadrant means. 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. The grid alone cannot tell them apart.
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 it makes the omission visible. A blank in that column is the finding.
Everyone is a priority means nobody is
Manage closely is expensive. It means real involvement in decisions and genuine two-way communication, and 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 anywhere else.
The grid is a snapshot
Power and interest both move. A stakeholder with no interest today becomes intensely interested the moment the project touches their area, and someone's power changes with a reorganisation you did not hear about.
Revisit it at each phase boundary. A map drawn at kickoff and never touched is describing a set of relationships that no longer exists.