Stakeholders

The stakeholder register lists the people and organisations involved in a project. You rarely add stakeholders by hand — the register fills itself as communications come in.

Where stakeholders come from

Stakeholders are created automatically as emails are processed:

• People on an email. When an email produces at least one register item, the people on it (From, To and Cc) are promoted to stakeholders — but only those who appear with a real display name. Bare addresses with no name, and automated senders (no-reply, mailer-daemon, task-tracker addresses, and the like), are skipped. They’re matched by email address, so the same person isn’t added twice.
• Sender signatures. When the classifier reads a signature block on a substantive email, the sender’s role, organisation and phone are added to their stakeholder record.

Importing an action with an owner email also creates a stakeholder for that owner. You can seed a whole starter list too — see Import your data — or use the Import button on this page. Each stakeholder’s detail page lists the emails they appeared in.

The same person seen under more than one address is kept as one stakeholder, and their detail page shows every address they’ve been seen under, with one marked as primary.

The engagement grid

A stakeholder can carry a power (influence) and interest rating, each on a 1–5 scale, shown together as power × interest. From those two numbers the project derives an engagement strategy (ratings of 4 or 5 count as “high”):

	Low interest	High interest
High power	Keep satisfied	Manage closely
Low power	Monitor	Keep informed

You can set a strategy explicitly, but it is re-derived from power × interest whenever either of those is changed. If a stakeholder has no power or interest set, no strategy is shown.

Power, interest and strategy aren’t edited from a form on this page — set them by importing a register that includes those columns, or by telling the project in chat (for example, “John Smith is the sponsor with high influence”).

Linking a stakeholder to a workspace user

A stakeholder is a person in the project record; a user is someone who signs in. Linking the two is what lets action items show up as that person’s work — work is assigned through this link.

ddx PMO links automatically when a stakeholder’s email exactly matches a verified email on a workspace user’s account, and only when exactly one user matches. On the stakeholder’s detail page you can also:

• Link a user by hand (a “pinned” link).
• Unlink, which both removes the link and turns off auto-matching for that stakeholder (shown as auto-matching off).
• Re-enable auto-matching afterwards.

Note

Shared mailboxes (like pmo@, info@, accounts@) are never auto-linked — one person verifying a team inbox would otherwise inherit everyone’s actions. Link those by hand if you need to.

A linked stakeholder shows a User badge in the list and a Workspace user badge on their detail page.