PBA Zone : Requirements Environment : Stakeholders

Stakeholders represent the interested or affected companies, groups, individuals or even systems that the initiative will impact. This impact can also include everything from solution interaction characteristics to money, budgeting, organizational dynamics to those politically involved.

It is always important to map stakeholders and understand their relationships to the specific project. Even more critical, it is vital to understand the relationships between stakeholders. Mapping these relationships can help architects understand the organizational and political landscape that they must navigate in order to ensure the success of the initiative. Of course, it also helps architects identify expectations with more clarity.

Types of Stakeholders

It’s important to understand that a stakeholder can have multiple classifications.

Common Classifications:

1) People, groups, organizations, or systems that control the financial, political, organizational and technical resources of the initiative.


2) People, groups, organizations, or systems that have an interest in the success or failure of this initiative:


3) People, groups, organizations, or systems that will interact with the final solution in production.


When mapping the stakeholders, many architects utilize the actor classification from a Use Case diagram to understand what the significant stakeholders are.

Notice that the groups and individuals who are responsible for designing it, financing and allocating resources for it are not represented.

Utilizing a use case diagram along is fairly limited. Not all stakeholders will be mapped to use cases (actionable verbs) in a use case diagram. This is where a Stakeholder model diagram works more effectively.

Example:

The above stakeholder map represents generic areas that associate itself with the target initiative of the architectural team.

Perspective Capture Core Questions for Stakeholders:


a) What/Who are the stakeholders for this specific solution?


b) What is important to each of these stakeholders for this specific solution?


c) When do the stakeholders expect this initiative to deliver its promised functional and systemic qualities?


d) When do the stakeholders expect the solution to deliver positive business performance metrics? (Are there SLA expectations?)


e) When do the stakeholders expect the solution to deliver positive operational metics? (Are there OLA expectations?)