Scope, Stakeholders, Goals

To start at the beginning: Your project has to build a productusually this is some software and sometimes hardwareto help people to do their work. And if your product is to be truly useful, then it must improve that work. Moreover, the cost of the product and its operation must be such that a net benefit is to be gained by building it.

We are talking about the work people do. To build the right product, you have to understand the work, the people who do or influence the work, and the end they are trying to achieve. We call this the trinity of stakeholdersgoalsscope (SGS). See Figure 3.4.

Figure 3.4.

The scope, stakeholders, and goals are not decided in isolation from one another. The scope of the work indicates which people have an interest in the outcome of building the productthe stakeholdersand they, in turn, decide what they want that outcome to bethe goals.

The scope is the extent of the business area affected by the product. The stakeholders are all the people who have an interest in or an effect on the success of the project. The goal is the improvement the business wants to experience when the product is installed.

There is no particular order to these factors (in fact, you iterate around the SGS circle until you have stabilized the deliverables), but scope is usually the most convenient place to start.