This activity involves identify the level of interest each stakeholder has in each scenario. With up to 15 stakeholders and up to 100 scenarios, it involves up to a total of 1,500 decision. Thankfully these decisions can usually be made very quickly, as all that is required is to decide, for a given scenario, whether a particular stakeholder has Strong Interest, Interest or No Interest in that scenario.
In some cases, where there may be a limited number of scenarios and stakeholders, it might be practical to add this activity as a final task for workshop that identified the scenarios and agreed the impact levels. This has the advantage that a group of stakeholders are in the room, and can discuss and agree each decision. And if someone has managed to populate the spreadsheet tool already with the scenarios and impact levels, then the interest of each stakeholder in each scenario can be recorded directly in the spreadsheet, in columns E to S of the ‘Scenarios & Stakeholders’ tab.
An alternative approach, which might be useful when there are large numbers of stakeholders and scenarios, involves asking the stakeholders separately to indicate their levels of interest in each scenario. This can be done, for example, by sending each one a spreadsheet that has been tailored by combining the scenario descriptions from column C of the ‘Scenarios & Stakeholders’ tab with the column for that stakeholder. Combining the responses back, when you get them from all the stakeholder representatives, then allows you to complete the matrix.
Although this activity is quite time consuming, it is really valuable as it prepares the ground for the subsequent trade-off analysis to consider the strengths and weaknesses of competing solutions from the differing perspectives of the stakeholders.