Understand Stakeholder Needs

A stakeholder is an individual or entity that is materially affected by the outcome of the system, such as a user , business sponsor, buyer, or product manager. During Inception, you need to elicit requests from the project stakeholders to understand what their most important needs are. The collected stakeholder requests can be regarded as a "wish list" that will be used as primary input to define the high-level features of the system, as described in the Vision, which drives the specification of the more detailed software requirements.

You should identify a small stakeholder team (say, two to five people) that represents the various groups that have a stake in the project. If this team is too large, you can spend more time managing the group than understanding stakeholder needs. At the same time, you need balance ”if the team is too small, you may not include everyone impacted by the results of the project.

The stakeholder wish list can be gathered through interviews or by arranging and facilitating a two- to four- hour workshop with the stakeholder team. During the session, discuss what the system should do, and document requests made by participants . You often need to get the discussion moving by asking leading questions such as, "What are the current problems you face with the existing system?", "What tasks do you spend the most time on today?", and "Which of your current tasks can be automated?"

As you document the requests, prioritize them, and note who made the request. You should also consider reviewing the results of the workshop with a representative subset of customers or users in a follow-up session. In this session, identify any issues that need to be clarified and, in turn , any tasks that need to be completed, and assign people to those tasks.

Stakeholder requests can be documented formally or informally, depending on the size and complexity of the project. For smaller projects, you might just create an informal wish list that is used as input for initial requirements work and then is thrown away. For larger projects ” especially if contractual agreements are involved ”you may choose to maintain a separate Stakeholder Request document.

As mentioned earlier, eliciting stakeholder requests is primarily done in Inception, with many updates in Elaboration. However, throughout the project, you will get useful requests from stakeholders. These are documented in Change Requests, and they should be continually reviewed to determine their suitability for inclusion in the project.

Also, if you are refining an existing system, reviewing change requests usually provides excellent information about stakeholder needs. Walk through all change requests, and identify which may qualify for inclusion in the next version of the system.