Bonjour to everyone,
I am Hamidou, from Dakar, Senegal. I recently joined PMO Mastery because I find very few places where PMO professionals discuss the real political dimension of project work.
My question today is about stakeholder mapping. In the organisations I have worked in, in Senegal, Ivory Coast and also in France for some years, the formal org chart almost never tells you where the real power is. The person with the biggest title is sometimes not the one whose opinion actually determines whether your project gets support or not.
There is always an advisor, a trusted colleague, a long-serving director who is not even in the steering committee but who can make leadership change direction with one conversation. If you do not identify these people early, you can do everything right technically and still loose the support of key stakeholders without even understanding why.
How do you map this kind of informal influence? Are there any practical techniques beyond the standard power-interest grid? And how do you engage these informal influencers without making it feel manipulative or political?
I am very curious to hear different perspectives on this, especially from people who work in different cultural contexts.
Hamidou, the informal influencer problem is one of the most underrated challenges in stakeholder work. The formal map tells you the governance structure. It does not tell you who shapes the decision over lunch before it ever reaches a meeting. We started doing short informal conversations at the start of major projects specifically to surface this. We ask sponsors and project leads: who do you check with before you commit to something? The answers are rarely the people on the org chart.
The approach Marloes describes is similar to what we do. The honest observation, though, is that this kind of intelligence gathering is a relationship skill, not a process skill. The PMs who are good at it tend to be naturally curious about organisational dynamics. The ones who struggle tend to want a template. I have not found a good way to systematise it, and I am not sure it can be systematised.
Thomas, that is an uncomfortable observation but probably true. A question for the group: how do you handle it when the informal decision maker is actively hostile to the project? We have a situation where a senior technical lead is clearly shaping decisions but refuses to attend formal meetings or be named in any governance document. Ignoring them has not worked. Engaging has been difficult. Not sure what the right move is.
The hostile informal decision-maker situation is genuinely difficult and I do not think there is a clean answer. One thing I have seen tried: making them an official reviewer of something specific, so their input gets channeled rather than avoided. Not always possible if they are actively resisting any governance role.
Also worth checking: is there someone they do trust who is already inside the project? The route to an informal influencer is sometimes through a third party rather than direct engagement. Trying to engage directly when someone is resistant can harden the position rather than open it.