Managing stakeholders
A stakeholder register is a record of anyone in your organization who has an investment in your Splunk implementation, from the managers who approved the purchase to the community who uses Splunk software every day.
Creating a stakeholder register is important because it helps you keep track of your Splunk constituents and understand their needs. This can be an important benchmark so you know what to do for which stakeholders, how to measure stakeholder success with Splunk, and ultimately, how to measure how Splunk helps the overall success of your organization.
Identify stakeholders
To get started, make a comprehensive list of anyone who may have a stake in your Splunk implementation, either directly or indirectly, for example:
- Managers
- Executives
- IT and infrastructure team
- Security operations
- Your Splunk team
- Other departments
- Customer-facing organizations
- Legal
Anyone with an interest in the success of your company or organization is a potential stakeholder, even investors, future employees, and users of your products and services. So although you may not have to manage regular communication with all these stakeholders, you may have occasion to spotlight insights gained through your Splunk use cases to these outside audiences. Accounting for them on your stakeholder register can also remind you of the wide-reaching effects of your work with Splunk.
A stakeholder register should be a living document that you update regularly as people and priorities shift. The register includes sensitive details, such as names, contact information, and management strategies, so keep your register in a secure location with restricted access, and exercise caution when sharing it.
Program managers are responsible for tracking stakeholder goals and making sure they are met. The program manager should create the stakeholder register during customer onboarding and update it regularly.
Guidelines for creating a stakeholder register
At a minimum, the stakeholder register should contain three types of information for each stakeholder:
- General information. Identifying data
- Assessment. Needs, expectations, and dependencies on the Splunk deployment
- Classification. Attributes used to identify types of stakeholders
These are described in more detail in the following sections.
Stakeholder general information
For each stakeholder, capture the following information:
- Name
- Title
- Contact information
- How they prefer to communicate (for example, email, phone, instant messaging)
- General role and responsibilities in their organization
- Whether they are internal or external to the company
- What version of Splunk they're using (if applicable)
Stakeholder assessment
Include a high level evaluation of each stakeholder, for example:
- What they need to know about Splunk software
- How often they need communication
- What their expectations of Splunk software are
- What influence they have on Splunk projects and activities
- What interest they have in Splunk software and what authority they have to influence decisions
This can be in a narrative format or organized tabularly depending on what tool you use for your stakeholder register.
Stakeholder classification
You can also manage groups of stakeholders by classifying them using various criteria. This resource is flexible; you can use classifications related to Splunk parameters or initiatives outside of Splunk. Here are some examples:
- Classify stakeholders based on their authority, responsibility, or interest in Splunk, for example, high, medium or low.
- Assign other attributes to stakeholders, such as internal, external, positive, supporter, detractor, neutral, champion, executive sponsor, contract signer, and so on.
Stakeholder management strategy
As an option, you can include stakeholder management strategy information in your stakeholder registry. Management strategy information includes ideas such as how to get users more involved, increase their training knowledge, and garner support for expanding Splunk operations and infrastructure.