The Stake-o-matic is one of those “scratch an itch” projects. It sits at the apex of:

  • my desire to improve my own ways of working;

  • the need for a little pet project to bring my Clojure experiments to life;

  • personal experiences in using stakeholder diagrams to convey the impact of a product or project.

What does it do?

The Stake-o-matic uses a simple CSV input format and turns it into a laser printer friendly diagram, e.g.:

Example stakeholder diagram

Usage

The usage should be self explanatory. The input should not have headers and only the first three columns are interpreted. Text should not be surrounded with double quotes. The columns are:

  1. Role. This is the role of the actor.

  2. Name. If desired, an actor can be named (e.g. the project sponsor “Mr. Smith”). The name will appear in square brackets.

  3. Area on the graph. A single character that indicates whether the actor is in the (O)perational area, the (C)ontaining business or the (W)ider environment.

For now the parser is relatively simple, e.g. it does not feature escaping of characters.

In closing

I hope that the Stake-o-matic is useful to someone out there other than me. That’s why I put it up here. Please try it and if you like it, spread the word.

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