Understanding who has a stake in your project is one of the most practical things a project manager can do early in the planning process. Stakeholders include anyone with an interest in your project’s outcome, from customers and team leads to clients and even family members in smaller ventures. The Stakeholder Cube gives you a structured way to map those relationships and understand how different variables affect each person’s level of engagement and satisfaction.
Used well, the cube keeps your team aligned and ensures no one is caught off guard when your project hits major milestones or faces setbacks. It creates shared awareness across your stakeholder community and supports better communication at every stage. This article walks through the definition, parameters, and practical application of the Stakeholder Cube, including how it compares to the Salience Model.
Stakeholder Cube Definition
The Stakeholder Cube is a refinement of simpler grid-based stakeholder models. Where a traditional grid plots stakeholders along two axes, the cube introduces a third dimension to create a more complete picture. According to PMBOK (13.1.2.4), this model combines grid elements into a three-dimensional structure that helps project managers and teams identify, analyze, and engage their stakeholder community with greater precision.
The three-dimensional format is what sets this model apart from earlier approaches. It accounts for the fact that stakeholder relationships are rarely flat or one-dimensional, and it gives project teams a tool that reflects the real complexity of managing multiple parties with overlapping and sometimes competing interests.
Stakeholder Cube Explanation
Creating a Stakeholder Cube begins with stakeholder mapping, which is the process of identifying who your stakeholders are, what they care about, and how your project will affect them. The mapping process also helps you distinguish between those who are actively invested in outcomes and those who may be indifferent. This distinction shapes how you allocate communication effort and engagement resources throughout the project lifecycle.
The cube model is built around three core parameters: power, influence, and interest. Each parameter captures a different dimension of a stakeholder’s relationship to your project, and together they give you a more complete view of the stakeholder landscape than any single axis could provide. Here are the three parameters that define the Stakeholder Cube model:
Power: This refers to a stakeholder’s ability to affect outcomes, decisions, or conditions related to your project. Power is often tied to organizational role or resource control, but it can be less formal than that. A senior executive has obvious power, but so does a long-tenured team member whose buy-in others tend to follow.
Influence: This parameter captures how much sway a stakeholder has over others involved in the project. Influence differs from power in that it is relational rather than positional. A stakeholder with high influence but limited formal authority can still shape perceptions, rally support, or create resistance depending on where they stand.
Interest: This covers what stakeholders stand to gain or lose as a result of your project. Interests include financial outcomes, professional reputation, operational impact, and personal relationships. Mapping interest levels helps you understand how closely each stakeholder will follow the project and how likely they are to stay engaged or disengage over time.
Power
Power is a stakeholder’s ability to make things happen the way they want within the context of your project. It can be formal, tied to budget authority or sign-off rights, or informal, rooted in expertise and organizational credibility. While power is sometimes difficult to quantify precisely, it is worth assessing because high-power stakeholders can accelerate progress or create serious obstacles depending on their level of support.
Influence
Influence is the second parameter of the Stakeholder Cube model. It includes several sub-dimensions: power relative to the project, communication access, and the ability to take actions that affect outcomes. Influential stakeholders may include project leads, department heads, or external parties whose opinions carry weight with key decision-makers. Even stakeholders who are not directly involved in your project can hold meaningful influence if others look to them for guidance.
Interests
Interests are what stakeholders stand to gain or lose as a result of your project. They can take many forms, including financial return, professional reputation, access to resources, and personal relationships. It is common to find that some stakeholders have no financial stake in a project at all, while others have reputational concerns that matter more to them than any monetary outcome. Identifying these distinctions early helps you frame your communication in ways that resonate with what each stakeholder actually cares about.
How to Create a Stakeholder Cube
Building a Stakeholder Cube works best when you treat it as a collaborative exercise rather than something done in isolation. Involving members from across your organization, including clients and relevant external parties, ensures that the model reflects a range of perspectives. When stakeholders help build the tool, they are also more likely to trust its outputs and act on its guidance.
The best approach is to work with your stakeholder team directly during the creation process. Their input brings context that you may not have on your own, and participation builds the kind of shared ownership that keeps everyone engaged as the project moves forward.
To build your cube in Excel or a spreadsheet tool, set up four columns with the following information:
Your full list of stakeholders, including internal team members, clients, and any external parties with a clear interest in the project.
Each stakeholder’s level of satisfaction with the project is measured using a scale that includes positive and negative values to capture both supporters and those with reservations.
A column identifying who will be directly affected by your project’s outcomes, even if their involvement is indirect or their impact is secondary.
A column for any additional notes on stakeholder priorities, preferred communication channels, or specific concerns that could affect how you engage with them.
The Salience Model and the Stakeholder Cube approach stakeholder analysis from different angles, and both have practical value depending on what you need to understand. The Salience Model is a visual framework that shows which stakeholders carry the most weight in relation to your project. It classifies stakeholders based on their power, legitimacy, and urgency, allowing you to identify who needs the most attention and why.
The Salience Model is particularly useful when you are trying to prioritize outreach or determine where to focus engagement efforts early in a project. It answers the question of who matters most in a given moment, rather than mapping the full depth of every stakeholder relationship.
The two models serve different but complementary purposes, and using both together gives you a more complete picture of your stakeholder environment. Here is how each model contributes to a well-rounded stakeholder strategy:
Stakeholder Cube: This model maps all three parameters of power, influence, and interest in a three-dimensional format. It gives you a full view of how stakeholders relate to your project and to each other, making it useful for ongoing communication planning and engagement strategy across the full project lifecycle.
Salience Model: This model focuses on identifying which stakeholders are most important at any given time, based on their power, legitimacy, and urgency. It is most useful for prioritization decisions, particularly when resources are limited, and you need to direct your engagement efforts where they will have the most impact.
Combined Use: When you use both models together, you gain the ability to identify who matters most and understand the full complexity of their relationship to your project. The Salience Model tells you where to focus; the Stakeholder Cube tells you how to engage once you get there.
How can you use the Stakeholder Model and Salience Model together?
Using both models together allows you to map not just who your stakeholders are, but how they feel about your project and what information they actually need from you. The Salience Model surfaces which stakeholders deserve the most immediate attention based on urgency and authority, while the Stakeholder Cube fills in the context about their interests and the nature of their influence.
Once you have applied both tools, you can build a communication and stakeholder engagement plan that is specific to each stakeholder rather than broadly addressed to the group as a whole. When a stakeholder appears resistant in the Salience Model, the cube helps you understand why by surfacing what they stand to lose or what influence they may be protecting. That combination turns analysis into action.
Stakeholder Cube PMP Example
The Stakeholder Cube is a key concept in the PMP framework, helping project managers go beyond basic stakeholder grids by adding a third dimension to their analysis. The video below walks through a practical example of how the model is applied in real project scenarios, making it easier to understand how power, influence, and interest work together in practice.
Conclusion
The Stakeholder Cube gives project managers a structured way to understand who their stakeholders are, what they care about, and how much weight they carry in relation to a project. By mapping power, influence, and interest across three dimensions, the model captures complexity that simpler grid-based tools tend to miss. When combined with the Salience Model, it becomes a complete framework for both prioritizing engagement and planning how to communicate effectively.
The practical value of this tool comes from using it collaboratively and revisiting it as your project develops. Stakeholder dynamics shift over time, and a model built at the start of a project may need to be updated as new parties become involved or existing relationships change. Teams that treat stakeholder analysis as an ongoing process, rather than a one-time exercise, tend to manage alignment and expectations more effectively across the board.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Stakeholder Cube
What is a stakeholder cube?
A stakeholder cube is a three-dimensional model used to visualize and analyze the relationships between a project and its stakeholders. It builds on simpler two-axis grid models by adding a third dimension, allowing project managers to account for the full range of factors that shape stakeholder engagement. The result is a more accurate picture of who is involved, how much influence they hold, and what they stand to gain or lose.
What are the 3 I’s of stakeholders?
The three I’s of stakeholders are interest, influence, and involvement. Interest refers to what stakeholders stand to gain or lose from the project’s outcomes. Influence describes how much sway they have over decisions, other people, or conditions related to the project. Involvement refers to how actively engaged they are in the project’s day-to-day activities and direction. Together, these three factors help determine the level of attention and communication each stakeholder requires.
What is a stakeholder tool?
A stakeholder tool is any framework, model, or method used to identify, analyze, and manage the people who have a stake in a project. These tools help project managers understand stakeholder needs, map relationships, and plan communication strategies. Examples include stakeholder matrices, salience models, and the Stakeholder Cube. Each tool serves a slightly different purpose, and many projects benefit from using more than one.
What is a stakeholder matrix used for?
A stakeholder matrix is a visual framework for mapping stakeholders according to their level of power and interest in a project. It helps project managers understand who needs active management, who needs to be kept informed, and who requires only minimal engagement. By placing each stakeholder in a defined quadrant, the matrix makes it easier to allocate communication resources and set appropriate expectations throughout the project.
What are the five levels of stakeholder engagement?
The five levels of stakeholder engagement are unaware, resistant, neutral, supportive, and leading. Unaware stakeholders do not know about the project or its implications. Resistant stakeholders are aware of the changes the project brings, but are actively opposed to them. Neutral stakeholders neither support nor oppose the project. Supportive stakeholders back the project and are willing to assist when needed. Leading stakeholders take an active role in advocating for the project and helping to bring others along.
Shane Drumm, holding certifications in PMP®, PMI-ACP®, CSM, and LPM, is the author behind numerous articles featured here. Hailing from County Cork, Ireland, his expertise lies in implementing Agile methodologies with geographically dispersed teams for software development projects. In his leisure, he dedicates time to web development and Ironman triathlon training. Find out more about Shane on shanedrumm.com and please reach out and connect with Shane on LinkedIn.
