Defining your Localization stakeholders in 3 steps

Last Thursday was my wedding anniversary! 🥳

We bought a strawberry cake that was delicious and we made a special evening that day.

We had the photo book of that unforgettable day at hand on a shelf in the living room and we took the opportunity to browse through it.

Many memories came to my mind at that moment, practically all of them very good, and I say practically because there was one thing that brought me upside down.

THE guest list.

Making the guest list and deciding where they would be seated I remember it was quite a headache!

We had a hard time agreeing! Some tables were clear who would be seated, but others, not so much!

Today, seen in perspective, I think that was the first time I did stakeholder management. Identifying the stakeholders of a wedding or of a Localization project, I have more points in common than I could imagine!

This week in my weekly post, inspired by the memories of my wedding day and the difficulties I had to create the guest list, I want to write about stakeholder management applied to the localization industry.

How to identify your organization's stakeholders

I often comment that a Localization team is the glue that binds the content generated in the company. I say this in the context that sooner or later the content that customers consume globally on their screens has passed through the Localization team.

A Localization team interacts with many people in a day. A Localization team has many lines of communication and stakeholders to interact with. This is great because it allows localization industry professionals to have a lot of visibility and opportunities to explain how the content we create and localize helps the overall growth of the company.

Identify the stakeholders of your localization program,

In this post, I am going to share a series of steps that have worked for me to better understand who I need to talk to, and where I should start!

But first things first, let's understand what is a stakeholder in a Localization project.

Stakeholders are the people, or teams, that are affected by the actions and decisions that we take when facing our Localization activities.

To identify them, it is essential to carry out a stakeholder mapping. Here is a summary of a series of steps to consider when doing our stakeholder analysis

1. Brainstorming of all the people/teams that come to mind

The first step is to brainstorm to identify all the stakeholders that may be affected by the product you are localizing. Here we must include all of them, i.e. people/teams that influence our Localization program. Either at the active level, such as a web designer who asks us for the translation of the page he is creating, or passively the back-end developer who is configuring the server that will host the site.

2. Analyze

In this second step, the roles and expectations of the stakeholders will be defined. This will help to discover and determine how important are the stakeholders found and what is the degree of influence of each one in the project.

3. Prioritize

The next step is to understand the needs of each stakeholder and their relationship to the project. To do this, it is necessary to prioritize the key stakeholders and determine the first communication actions to be carried out.

This prioritization phase is key since depending on the position assigned to each stakeholder and their degree of interest, we will have to define the actions to be taken.

When prioritizing, there are 4 levels to consider

1.- Stakeholders with a high degree of power and very interested in the project.

• These stakeholders will be fully involved throughout the Localization process and we will make an effort to keep them satisfied. Sample question that can help you identify this stakeholder group is for example

  Does the stakeholder opinion have a fundamental impact on your team or the localization project you are running?

Example: The Product Owner of the digital app you are localizing.

This group includes stakeholders with whom the Localization team routinely deals and to whom they deliver.

2.- Stakeholders with a high degree of power, but who are not very interested in the project. We will keep this group informed, satisfied, but avoid boring them with details about how we are executing our Localization activities on a day-to-day basis. A typical question that can help you identify this stakeholder group is for example: could this person or group of people actively block the progress of my Localization Project? Example: The financial controller assigned to the project account you are localizing.

3.- Stakeholders with little power, but very interested in the project.

• This group of stakeholders will be kept properly informed about the progress of the project to avoid future problems that may jeopardize the continuity of the project. These stakeholders can be your allies in executing your localization strategy. HR is an example of a stakeholder that falls into this group.

Another stakeholder that depending on how we look at it can fall into this group are actually the final users of the product we are localizing. Whenever possible it is tremendously useful to find a way to interact with the end-users of our product. Whenever possible, connect with end-users, as they provide invaluable input on how our localized products perform in real life.

4.- Stakeholders with little power and less interest in the project. We keep them informed but we will dedicate little time to them. Here I do not give any examples of users who fall into this group so as not to offend anyone's sensibilities 😅

In conclusion

Think of your stakeholders as the most important people in your project. They are, as a whole, the ones affected by the actions you carry out during the management of your project. Involving them in the right way is vital to be able to satisfactorily carry out everything we want to do when we tackle the far from easy task of increasing our international growth.

I wish you all the best in this exciting exercise which is defining and managing your stakeholders

@yolocalizo