The 15-Minute Stakeholder Brief
Your RACI tells you who signs off. It won't tell you how to handle them.
A decision has to land at Thursday's steering committee, and what concerns you is two of the people in the room. Your CFO has gone quiet over the past month, and your ops lead will agree with everything while you're together, then send three new requirements the next day. Your project documentation doesn't help, because it describes the work rather than the people doing it.
The 15-Minute Stakeholder Brief is a workbook, one page of project context plus a row for each person with a stake in the outcome. You fill it in, then paste one of three included prompts into Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot or Gemini. What comes back is a per-person read: what each one cares about, what they're afraid of, what earns a yes from them, and what gets you a no. The first pass takes about fifteen minutes, and you'll have something usable before your next meeting.
Free Download: Get The Stakeholder Brief
The guide, the workbook and the three prompts.
By downloading, you agree to receive occasional emails from Shack Consulting. We never share your information, and you can unsubscribe at any time.
See What Comes Back
This is what came back for one meeting. Four lines went in: what the meeting was, when it was, who would be in the room, and what needed to be decided. The first thing it said back was that the two people who controlled the work had not been invited.
Notice there is nothing in it you could paste into another project. Every line names a person and something to do before Thursday.
What's Inside
A short guide covering how to build the stakeholder brief.
The Microsoft Excel workbook, with a project context block you need to fill in and a place for your stakeholder register. You provide what you know, and AI fills in the rest.
Three copy-paste prompts: one that builds a brief for every stakeholder, one that preps you for a specific meeting, one that preps you for a conversation you've been avoiding.
Who Should Download This
- You lead a project with several stakeholders, or you’re about to start one.
- You already have a RACI or a stakeholder list.
- Someone on your project agrees in meetings and then stalls.
- You have a decision coming up that depends on one or two people.
- You have asked AI for help with this and gotten generic advice back.
About Jeff Maldavir
I'm Jeff Maldavir, founder of Shack Consulting. I've spent more than twenty years leading complex, cross-functional initiatives for organizations including Hyatt, Reebok, JP Morgan Chase, Girl Scouts of the USA, and Blood Cancer United, where I recently helped lead a multi-year national rebrand.
I've also taught project management to more than 1,600 learners, so I know the difference between what people actually use on the job and what only sounds good in a class.
I built this out of the situations I kept running into and never had a good way to prepare for. There was the director who nods in the room and then goes quiet, and the two department leads who want the same thing and have no idea they are on the same side. None of it shows up in a project plan, and all of it slows a project down. This is what I put together to get ahead of it.
Free Download: Get The Stakeholder Brief
The guide, the workbook and the three prompts.
By downloading, you agree to receive occasional emails from Shack Consulting. We never share your information, and you can unsubscribe at any time.
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