Other Stakeholders

There are more people you have to talk to so that you can find all the requirements. Your contact with these people might be fleeting, but nevertheless necessary. Any of them may potentially have requirements for your product.

"Every context is composed of individuals who do or do not decide to connect the fate of a project with the fate of the small or large ambitions they represent."

Source: Bruno Latour, ARAMIS or the Love of Technology

The problem that we often face is that we do not know who all the stakeholders are, and thus we fail to consider them. This results in a string of change requests when the product starts being used, and has an adverse effect on people we overlooked. When any new system is installed, somebody gains and somebody loses power. This shift may be a subtle gain or loss, or it may be a wholesale change. People may find that the product brings them new capabilities, or people may not be able to do their jobs the way they used to do them. The moral of the story is clear: Find everyone who will be affected by the product, and find their requirements.

We list our stakeholders in section 2 of the Volere Requirements Specification Template. This list acts as a checklist, pointing the requirements analysts to the right people for gathering their requirements.

Let's consider some other stakeholders by looking at some candidate categories. You can also see most of these illustrated as classes on the stakeholder map (Figure 3.6).