What is Stakeholder Analysis?
Stakeholder analysis systematically works out who your stakeholders are, what they want, how much they matter, and how they relate to each other — feeding the register, the grids (power/interest, salience), and ultimately the engagement plan. It starts at day one and re-runs at every major change, because the landscape moves.
The dimension people skip is relationships between stakeholders: coalitions and rivalries often matter more than any individual's attitude.
Worked example
Analyzing a factory-expansion project: the plant manager (high power, supportive), the environmental agency (high power, neutral, process-driven), a neighborhood group (low power, opposed) — and the analysis note that matters: the group's chair is the agency director's former colleague. That relationship line turns "low power, monitor only" into "engage early and respectfully," which later proves to be the project's smartest hour.