Interested Party Model

What is an Interested Party Model?

An Interested Party Model describes the organization’s relationship with its environment – those who make demands on us and those we make demands on. The Interested Party Model is an important part of, for example, a management system, as it allows you to clarify the requirements that must be met in relation to the outside world. The model is an effective tool for finding out which interested parties are in some way affected by what we do. What we do does not always have to be defined as the organisation itself, but can be a project, an individual process or an IT system.

Why should you use the Interested Party Model?

A Interested Party Model can be used in any context where we want to ensure that we consider those affected by, for example, a project or a change in working practices in a process. The type of model helps us:

1. Increase the understanding of needs and demands We increase our knowledge by visualizing our interested parties and their relationship to what we do. The model in a context explains why we do what we do, what information needs to be exchanged, and what other areas are involved.
2. Increase Engagement By involving more people and developing the interested party model together, we include more perspectives. Developing the model in workshops not only promotes collaboration and engagement, but also increases the quality.
3. Transparency and Clarity When we visualize our interested parties, we create a transparent picture of what we do. It becomes clear what drives us and what direction we want to work towards.

How do you create a Interested Party Model?

When mapping a graphical interested party model, the first step is to place an interested party object in the center of the model surface. For example, it could be ‘Company’, ‘Customers’, ‘Government’, or ‘Project’.

The next step is to place everyone who has some interest in the object around the object in the center. Then, we draw relationship arrows from the center to the objects representing the object interested parties.

The above example shows that the ‘Company’ has interested parties such as ‘Customers‘, ‘Employees‘, ‘Owners‘, ‘Government‘, ‘Unions‘ and ‘Suppliers‘. We can then extend our interested party model by visually describing how everyone relates to each other outside the business interface. This can be anything from a customer’s customer to suppliers’ subcontractors.