Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
(see Chapter 2 on Systems). Anything else leads to requirements that will
be incomplete.
Common stakeholders include:
The sponsors (who are funding the work)
The business user (the department for which the application is
being developed)
The actual users of the applications
All persons who will build the application
All persons who will support the application (customer support,
technical support, training, roll out, etc.)
All persons who will be impacted by the roll-out of the application
(those displaced, those users who will not have the old version
of the application or the “other” application to use once the new
application is rolled out, etc.)
All regulators (security, audit, legal, etc.)
It helps to view stakeholders as those who have a role to play in ensuring
success. This can be a long list. It is better to err, initially at least, on the
side of considering more parties as stakeholders than fewer parties. Some
can be dropped once initial discussions on scope and deliverables are
held.
There is an understandable fear in increasing the list of stakeholders.
If each of them comes up with their own requirements, then the require-
ments can become unwieldy. The solution to this problem is not to ignore
any of the stakeholders, but rather to have an auxiliary process to reconcile
and prioritize requirements. Ignoring a genuine stakeholder is fraught with
risk because he or she will, at a possibly inopportune moment, insist on
their requirements being met.
It is common to miss out on those stakeholders whose role is fleeting.
For example, certain E-commerce projects have scrambled at the last
minute, trying to get legal approval for opening-page disclaimer verbiage
to be put on the sites before they can roll out an application to customers,
because they had not identified the legal department as a stakeholder. In
large organizations, many projects lose precious time in the beginning
during setup, waiting for security clearance for user IDs because they
have not identified the Security department as one of the stakeholders for
the project requirements.
