20.2 Multiple Stakeholders

Every project should undertake a stakeholder analysis. Stakeholders who may be important to the performance of configuration management may be

• Customers or authorities with special requirements for the use of standards, such as military, space travel, medical, or other safety-critical systems

• Customers with their own standards/ideas

• Subcontractors with their own standards/ideas

• Other departments in the company, such as test or operation

The more stakeholders in a given project, the more complicated the work may be. But the work may also become easier if one or more of the stakeholders has clear requirements about how to perform configuration management.

Get an Overview of the Requirements

In a project with many stakeholders, it's important to ascertain the influence each stakeholder has or wants to have. One could ask oneself these questions:

• Who has indispensable requirements for configuration management, and which requirements?

• Who has requests concerning configuration management, and what are they?

• Who has requirements or requests for interfaces to their configuration management system, and what are they?

• Who can help accomplish the task, and how?

It may be a good idea to produce overviews of the requirements for each stakeholder independently and compare these in a more or less formal way, possibly including priorities.

Analyze the Requirements

Requirements can first be divided into generic requirements and explicit requirements. An example of a generic requirement (from [PPS-05-09]) is "SCM09 The identifier of a configuration item shall include a version number." An example of an explicit requirement is the format for a unique identification. Investigate which ex-plicit requirements match which generic requirements and whether requirements conflict (and if so, which have the greatest weight).

Describe the Fulfillment

On the basis of the requirements analysis, prepare a fulfillment matrix showing how the configuration management system employed by the project meets the requirements. Where the requirements suggest better solutions, the project's configuration management system must be adapted .

Conflict of Authority

Conflicts of authority may arise between different stakeholders, such as departments, in connection with configuration management. It's essential to make borderlines clear and establish how cooperation can take place across them. It may be complicated, for example, for a project to include tools in configuration management that are under the jurisdiction of an operations department. In this case, metadata could merely refer to the tools.