Map

To find out who is around a piece of work before they find you. Projects rarely stall on the thing being built. They stall on somebody who was not consulted, whose objection arrives late and is entirely reasonable.

Use it at the start of anything that crosses a team boundary, and again whenever something has gone quiet for a fortnight without an obvious reason. The map is usually not surprising. What surprises people is how many boxes have nobody in them.

List the people, then mark each one for how much the outcome affects them and how much say they have. Those are different axes, and the interesting names are the ones high on one and low on the other.

Somebody heavily affected with no say is where resistance comes from later. Somebody with say who is barely affected is where delay comes from, because the decision is never their priority. Write the last time you actually spoke to each person. Where the answer is never, that is the week you find out what you have been assuming.

The map becomes an org chart with colours. Reporting lines tell you who is senior, not who can stop this, and the person who can stop it is often three levels down and holds the system it depends on.

The other failure is treating it as a one-off. People move, priorities move, and a map from the start of a long project describes a room that no longer exists. Redraw it at each phase. It takes twenty minutes and it is the cheapest way to notice that your sponsor changed jobs.