A Better Way to Manage Internal Stakeholder Relationships

Using Stakeholder Relationship Management to Enhance Collaboration

One of the world’s largest furniture brands was looking for ways to enhance cross team collaboration. Frustrated by the limitations of spreadsheets and org charts, they chose Simply Stakeholders to map their internal relationships.

Challenge

Strategic projects often require close teamwork between members of different teams. But in this organization, with more than 200,000 employees spread across three independent business units and hundreds of teams, it was extremely challenging for individuals to assess who they should be working with.

Our contact at this company soon realized that a simple org chart wasn’t going to be enough. They needed:

• To show more than just job titles and a 2D representation of hierarchy
• The ability to search for people with specific skills, specialties, and preferences
• To see past roles and real-world, interpersonal relationships
• Access to a history of all interactions from previous collaborations
• To easily update the information, with people constantly changing roles, moving departments, completing training, developing new relationships, and participating in new projects

They had tried using spreadsheets, but quickly discovered that to capture the minimum required data, they’d need scores of columns, a long list of difficult-to-use filters, and an array of ad-hoc comments. And this solution would have no easy way to search or display data. In addition to this, editing spreadsheets is tedious and prone to errors, so individuals would avoid doing it, leaving the document static and out of date.

Our contact had also tried using a CRM. But this didn’t work because CRMs are built for tracking customers and deals, not internal relationships. They could really only associate a single person with a single role in a single team within a single business unit. There was no way to track organic relationships, past roles, skills, experience, and so on.

Solution

After hearing about Simply Stakeholders’ relationship management capabilities, the organization booked a demo and undertook an initial trial of the platform. They were keen to see if it would tick all the boxes for managing internal relationships to increase collaboration.

Some of the features and capabilities they were keen to implement included:

• Contact Records – Storing contact information for internal stakeholders, including role, location, and email address
• Multiple Organizations – Being able to see the entire organization or see each business unit separately
• 3D Network Map – Visualizing the relationships between stakeholders on a 3D map that shows how each individual is connected (including connections outside of their official role)
• Relationship Health – Generating a Relationship Health Score to analyze the health of relationships based on interaction history
• Linked Stakeholders – Linking individuals to multiple roles, teams, business units, and other individuals
• Tagging – Tagging individuals with relevant info, such as skills and preferences
• Full History – Recording a full history of paid interactions and collaborations
• Searchability – The ability to search all data records and interactions
• Easy Updates – The ability to easily add new contact records and interactions via email plugins and integrations

Outcome

Since implementing Simply Stakeholders, users within this company can easily identify opportunities for collaboration between team members — even members who work in separate departments or who have never met before.

With the 3D Network Map, users can see who each person knows and how they’re connected (beyond their official role and org structure). They can easily discover more detail by clicking on any person in the network to see a complete audit trail or all interactions and past collaborations, along with Relationship Health. Linking and tagging capabilities make it easy to see key information at a glance.

Best of all, because the data delivers real value and the system is easy to use (no matter how much data is added), the company has a live database of information that users will continue to update and maintain.

Simply Stakeholders looks forward to continuing to support this client with tools to manage their internal stakeholders and relationships!