Three Key Stakeholders You May Have Forgotten

Stakeholders are commonly verbose with opinions regarding the Project process and overall development lifecycle. However, there are some silent stakeholders whose value should be taken under keen consideration. These are:

The Business Mission - What we do, who we do it for, and why we are different from other providers of similar products or services.

In our excitement for something new, we risk forgetting the business mission which is the most important and sometimes a silent stakeholder of the project. If what we create doesn’t serve the mission, it may be excellent work but so what?

One way to ensure this stakeholder is included is to document the chain of strategies. First the business strategy, then the goals & objective’s strategies for a stated time period, the project strategy to support those goals and objectives and finally the design strategy. Make it a simple visual so you can share it with the team.

Business Process Flow - The current way we work needs to stay stable until you intentionally want to change it. Intentional is the keyword. So many technology projects don’t identify how they are unintentionally changing the ways of working. Many times, it’s because those involved with the project don’t know they are impacting the current process.

Once again, the best way to share the current state with the critical members of the project team is to document how the process works today. The team can continually refer back to this document as they design technology and identify areas that will change the way of working.

Systems and Data Flow - The current applications, their integration points, data stores, business rules, filters, algorithms, and all the versions of moving data around the system. This is part of the current process and the ways of working, however, they tend to be forgotten because they work silently every day. When we introduce new technology we can again unintentionally change the way our systems work. It’s better to document the current system’s ways of working and intentionally make changes.

Two primary advantages emerge from the inclusion of these three key and sometimes silent stakeholders.

1. You will build technology components and only the technology components that serve your ultimate mission. For some of us, technology is interesting, exciting, and we like what’s new. None of those things matter. What matters is serving our mission.
2. You will intentionally create change in your systems and your organization’s ways of working. There is high value in stabilizing some aspects of organizations and reducing surprises, especially the negative ones when we change systems and processes with purpose.

For more information documenting your mission in alignment with your business process and system flows, call Endiem.