Starting a project: stakeholders
Getting started with a project is always difficult. Either you start as an experiment and quickly end up trying to stuff a world of functionality into your product, or you work in an organisation where someone with influence says ‘we need a product that does this’.
No matter what project management strategy you maintain, you need to do some ground work before you can actually start a project to deliver product X. One of the first steps is to sit down with the stakeholders and see if it is even a good idea to create this product.
Now you are faced with the task of getting the group of people together whom you should consider the stakeholders, but how do you determine them? You cannot just point to a bunch of people and say ‘you are a stakeholder’, with great certainty you will be able to say that whatever you think up will need to be redone later because you did not have the right people deciding what to do.
So, what should you do? I have seen companies that have said ‘just make it and we’ll review it later’; this approach basically guarantees that whatever you create, it will be wrong because you have absolutely no information to work with. Other companies have so-called ‘Product Managers’, people dedicated to caring for a product, in a non-operation sense. Having only these people around the table when you try to decide what should be done or if it should be done at all will also always result in absolute failure.
What then? So far, for me, the simpelest thing to use is to look at the work domains surrounding the new product to get a list of stakeholders that can tell you something usefull about the product you wish to build.
Lets take as an example a novel product called a ‘Blog’. Someone hires you to determine the requirements of this product. In order to get a sense of the domains surrounding the product you ask the initiator what they see when talking about a ‘Blog’.
Most likely the initiator will say that they expect someone to ‘Write’ something so that others can ‘Read’ it. Great, writing and reading are your first domains, now you go over to the person (or people) that have been marked as ‘writers’ and ask them what they expect at this point. They will tell you that they expect to ‘write’ something, have it ‘reviewed’, ‘published’ and ‘announced’ to the outside world. They also expect that readers can leave ‘comments’ and that they can respond to them.
After doing a little bit of research into the subject you also notice there are several standards for certain parts of a ‘Blog’, namely ’syndication’ and ‘trackback’.
If you put all this information into a simple context diagram (with some images from technorati, gravatar, wordpress and rss) you see a nice overview of who, at this point, are your major stakeholders.
The context of your product
It does not take a lot of effort to find out what the major domains of work are related to your product, which will then lead you to your stakeholders.
These stakeholders you can call together for a project kick-off meeting to determine how to move on; a nice subject for the next time!
