Project Stakeholders

A stakeholder is more than just the people signing off on the project. Smart project planning involves contact with everyone who will be impacted by the project down to the end user.

Who are your subject matter experts (SME)?

Your SMEs are vital to understanding the nuances of a business. These could be front line employees who work with customer, people in customer service, designers, engineers; these people know the ins and outs. Often you will be planning deeper walkthroughs with these individuals where you may actually spend time on site or doing screen shares of their day to day.

Who is the customer?

Sometimes the customer is the client for an internal facing tool, but it also can be the general public. At the func-spec phase, you may not be doing customer testing, but you need to profile your customers, and eventually, involve them in testing if you build the product.

Who is an approver?

Approvers are the final sign off on different stages of the project. These may change at different stages and may have different levels of understanding. It’s not uncommon that someone may be an approver that actually has little grasp of the project itself. Be careful in these situations, you can get an easy approval by someone like this without actually delivering on a great solution.

Who is a reviewer?

Reviewers are people that I feel should get eyes on a project but might not have authority. These may be SMEs or other individuals that can provide valuable feedback on what has been done. A step may have one final approver and several reviewers that should be spending time thoroughly examining work.

The ‘in the loop’ people

Identify who needs to know where things are at. These people don’t always exist, but often the project champions and high ranking stakeholders often want to know at a glance as projects progress, even if they have little input into each step. Everyone has a boss to report to, and that boss always wants to know ‘where things are at’.

Champions

I’ve found it vital to have a project champion with the client. This should be a stakeholder of value in opinion within the organization that wants the project to succeed and is willing to collaborate openly. When projects struggle, they help smooth the client side to keep things from getting too agitated.

Identifying a Goal

What does success look like? On the surface, this might seem simple like ‘have a functioning business app’, but that’s not good enough. 

• What is the role of the app? 

• Why would people use it? 

• How does it add value? 

• What are the pain points we’re overcoming?

Identifying a true goal is about asking why enough times to boil it down to something irreducible. Often the solution is not the goal, it facilitates the goal.

“We want our customers to have a personalized, on-device service that connects to our business. Through an app, we will have a secure customer connection that offers a convenient interface that is a market leader in online banking.”

Ok, that’s a goal we can work towards.