The concepts behind the Stakeholder Relationship Diagram are based on the some of the ideas contained in Roger Burlton’s Business Process Management.
The purpose of the Stakeholder Relationship Diagram is to show relationships between an organizational unit (although you can have more than one organizational unit on the diagram) and categories of key stakeholder.
Note You are not modeling individual stakeholders, but the groups they belong to. These are named stakeholder categories.
The diagram is typically created by placing one Organizational Unit on the diagram and as many Stakeholder Categories as are needed to appear in the view. The Stakeholder Relationship line is drawn from the Organizational Unit to a Stakeholder Category. The value of the “Relationship Health” property is displayed on the line. This property can take on the values of 'Excellent”, “Good”, “Fair”, “Poor” or “Unknown”. See the example below.
In the example above, you see Stakeholder Categories can belong to larger Stakeholder Categories – for example, at the bottom of the diagram, the Stakeholder Categories of Regulatory Bodies, Suppliers, and Labor Unions are part of a larger category named External. The Organization in focus – JK Enterprises – has a Stakeholder Relationship to Labor Unions that is considered to be Good.
You can specify the Health of the Stakeholder Relationship in the definition of the line.
Stakeholder can belong to one or more Stakeholder Categories – you specify the Stakeholders belonging to a Stakeholder Category in the Stakeholder Category definition. This definition is not represented as a symbol on any diagram. This is shown below.
There are a number of properties and relationships associated with the Stakeholder Relationship definition. In the following screen shot, note the Principles, Expectations and Services tabs.
Stakeholder Relationship line properties
An explanation of each of the user-supplied properties in the Stakeholder Relationships definition is given below.
Relationship is guided by Principles is a ListOf Principles. A user would enter those principles that animate or guide the relationship with that stakeholder category. A principle can guide multiple relationships.
Stakeholder Expectations is a ListOf Stakeholder Expectations. The Stakeholder Expectation definition is keyed to the stakeholder category. The purpose of this property is to identify the expectations the stakeholder category has for the organization in focus.
The Stakeholder Expectation definition is one of the indices in the “Business Objective is aligned with Stakeholder Expectation” matrix. This matrix can be found in the Enterprise Direction Matrices tab in the matrix browser. With this matrix, a user can show that a given Business Objective is in alignment of an identified Stakeholder Expectation. Its purpose is to show alignment (or lack thereof) between the organization’s direction and expectations of key groups. See the matrix below.
Critical Success Factors is a ListOf Critical Success Factors for this relationship.
Services delivered to Stakeholder is a ListOf Business Services. A Business Service is a new definition type. There is a corresponding Services delivered to Organization which shows the services the organization expects to receive from the stakeholder category.
The Business Services definition is further linked to elements on process diagrams. Depending on the business process notation used, a user can link a Business Service to Results (on a Process Chart), Units of Behavior (on an IDEF3), or BPMN Events (on a Business Process diagram). The idea here is that a service (and a business service in particular) is delivered as the outcome of a series of processes. Thus, a user can show at a contextual level what services the organization provides to stakeholders, and link these services to internal processes.
