Aligning Stakeholders on a Stacking Plan

In any real estate reorganization project, the stacking plan is a fundamental tool: it materializes the strategy for occupying floors and plateaus, associating teams with available spaces. It's a key step in macro-zoning, which serves as the foundation for future fitout.

But in practice, this step — supposed to be purely rational — often transforms into a laborious process, source of tensions, endless back-and-forth, and sometimes even inconsistent decisions. Why? Because stacking isn't just a matter of square meters, it's an exercise in balancing interests between a multitude of actors.

A slow, complex process… and deeply political

Behind the apparent neutrality of a stacking plan lie human, strategic, and political stakes. Each decision — assigning a floor to a team, bringing two functions closer, isolating a hub — has concrete implications on employees' lives, team dynamics, and operational efficiency.

Who are the stakeholders?

General management: they primarily seek to optimize costs, value spaces, and embody a strategic vision (collaboration, flexibility, company culture).

HR: they ensure quality of life at work, social interactions, and equity between teams.

Business units: they defend their teams' needs, their growth, their need for confidentiality or proximity with certain services.

IT / general services: they think in terms of networks, logistics, accessibility, and technical constraints.

Space planners and architects: they translate all this into square meters and realistic plans.

Each of these actors has their own reading of the project, their own priorities, and sometimes even their own agendas. The stacking plan then becomes a negotiation ground, even a source of tensions.

Divergent expectations

Let's take a few examples:

A sales team wants to be close to marketing, but these two teams don't have the same size or the same confidentiality needs.

Management wants to group all management on the same floor to create a "leadership floor," but this implies splitting operational teams.

HR wants to favor service diversity to break silos, while managers prefer homogeneous hubs, easier to manage.

Faced with this, the space planner does their best to translate these constraints onto a plan… but without adapted tools or collaborative methods, this quickly becomes a ping-pong game.

What if we stopped the ping-pong?

Traditionally, creating the stacking plan follows a sequential method: the space planner collects everyone's needs, produces a version of the plan, which is then shared with all stakeholders. This is followed by comments, objections, sometimes contradictory modification requests… and the process starts over. Two weeks later, a new version is produced, often already obsolete or still unsatisfactory.

This mode of operation has several limitations:

Lack of reactivity: each iteration takes time, slowing down the entire project.

Stakeholder disengagement: some teams don't feel heard or integrated into decisions.

Gap between plan and reality: due to lack of shared understanding, the plan validated on paper doesn't always work on the ground.

Result: time is lost, engagement is lost, and sometimes even trust in the process.

Stackfit: a tool to align quickly, collectively, and transparently

It's in this context that Stackfit takes on its full value. Designed to facilitate interactive macro-zoning, Stackfit allows building stacking plans in real-time, integrating needs, constraints, and trade-offs directly in the interface.

But Stackfit isn't just a technical tool: it's a collaborative governance lever. It transforms a generally top-down task into a participative and iterative process, animated in the form of workshops with stakeholders.

How does it work?

During a stacking workshop with Stackfit:

Each actor can express their needs (capacities, proximity, confidentiality, adjacencies…).

The plan adjusts in real-time according to collective trade-offs.

Constraints are visualized: overcapacity, team isolation, distance from key functions…

Several scenarios can be quickly tested to compare options.

We no longer work "on a file" that we send back and forth: we co-construct the solution together, with a shared and immediate vision of the result.

Concrete benefits

Faster decisions: no more waiting for the new version of the plan in PowerPoint.

Better adoption: participants understand trade-offs and validate them in real-time.

Less frustration: each stakeholder sees that their constraints are taken into account.

Risk reduction: we anticipate blocking points rather than discovering them late.

Conclusion: from mapping to co-construction

Stacking isn't a simple placement exercise: it's a moment of strategic convergence for a company. Too often perceived as a technical puzzle, it deserves to be approached as a collective, structured, and transparent approach.

With Stackfit, we move from a slow and siloed process to a fluid and participative approach. It's not just a time gain: it's a posture change, which places users at the heart of the decision. And if, finally, aligning stakeholders on a stacking plan wasn't an impossible mission… but simply a mission poorly equipped until now?