Understanding Stakeholders


Lead Advocacy Group: Product Management

Stakeholder analysis is a process to identify key people and organizations that have a vested interest in a project. As defined in Chapter 4, "Building an MSF Team," the following people might be stakeholders:

  • Project sponsor(s) Initiates, funds, and approves an effort

  • Customer(s) (also known as business sponsors) Takes receipt of a solution and expects to gain business value from it

  • User(s) Interacts with a solution

  • Operations team Hosts, maintains, and administers a solution

With potential for such a wide collection of people and organizations, it is important to understand who the key stakeholders are and have a general understanding of the rest. So, how does a team find out who are the stakeholders? How do they make sure they understand stakeholder interests, motivations, and drivers? How does a team work with stakeholders throughout the life cycle? It is hard but possible. Basically, a team can follow the MSF Governance Model in that it goes through tracks of activities in conceptually understanding who stakeholders are; plan out how to refine the team's understanding and start to represent that understanding in a stakeholder map that shows what and how they relate to a solution and project team; start to meet with stakeholders to develop the team's understanding; test that understanding on a few "friendly" ones; and wrap up stakeholder analysis with "delivering" a list of stakeholders and a stakeholder map. These deliverables are used in subsequent tracks to continue working with stakeholders.

Stakeholder analysis involves three key activities:

  • Identify them

  • Prioritize them

  • Understand them

Identifying Stakeholders

When the core project team first starts mapping out the conceptual solution, people and organizations external to a project team associated with these conceptual components start to surface. These are a team's initial batch of stakeholders. This list of stakeholders grows as solution components become clearer and new groups and key people associated with these components are added to the list. Typically, this list grows as solution usage scenarios and/or use cases are developed to flush out the system wherein stakeholders are identified. Keep in mind that stakeholders are also members of the extended project team.

Prioritizing Stakeholders

With potentially so many stakeholders, a team must come up with a means to sift through this list to identify which stakeholders have the most impact and influence on a project (i.e., prioritize the list). Going forward, a team should concentrate their efforts on only this "short list" of key stakeholders.

There are many ways to prioritize stakeholders. One means to achieve this is to map the long list into quadrants where the axes are differentiating qualities (e.g., domain knowledge, availability, constituency backing, and new technology acceptance). Figure 7-2 is one such example using impact and influence as the axes to indicate the type of relationship with the stakeholder. In this example, key stakeholders are those placed in the three identified quadrants:

  • Managed Relationship Very influential with significant impact on a project. The relationship with these stakeholders needs to be well managed.

  • Informed Relationship Very influential but low to moderate impact on a project. These stakeholders should be kept apprised of project status but do not need to be closely managed.

  • Coordinated Relationship Low to moderate influence but significant impact on a project. These stakeholders often are users who should continually be included in discussions with a project team throughout the life cycle.

Figure 7-2. Example of types of stakeholder relationships to reflect priority


Stakeholders with little influence and little impact on a project should be considered, but often there is little time to expend to maintain a relationship with them.

Understanding Key Stakeholders

Understanding key stakeholders means knowing what motivates them and drives their involvement with a project with the goals of gaining commitment and support from them. Not all stakeholders will be supporters; some will be "anchors" that are seemingly bent on hindering a project but because of their position and influence are necessary stakeholders. Other stakeholders might seem neutral and apathetic.

A team needs to understand the key stakeholders to facilitate their continual involvement. This includes making sure they are involved and interested in participating in major checkpoint reviews. It also means knowing how, what, and when to communicate with the stakeholders.




MicrosoftR Solutions Framework Essentials. Building Successful Technology Solutions
Microsoft Solutions Framework Essentials: Building Successful Technology Solutions
ISBN: 0735623538
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 137

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