INEFFECTIVE STAKEHOLDER ENGAGEMENT: A SERIOUS DANGER FOR AGILITY

A Scrum team seeking to ensure relevance, legitimacy, and impact of outputs struggles without the goodwill of stakeholders, regardless of how well the development team writes code.

During product development, any development team must engage with a variety of stakeholders. However, ineffective or insufficient engagement undermines stakeholders' trust.

This problem will worsen over time if not properly addressed.

Let's first discuss what a stakeholder is before we delve into why not engaging them is dangerous for the software development process.

The stakeholder is any individual or group whose interest may be positively or negatively impacted or perceived to be impacted by the product. Moreover, the stakeholder is someone who can exert positive or negative influence over the product.

Each stakeholder can belong to one stakeholder group based on their profession, knowledge, expertise, or background, or can be grouped based on matching needs or interests but can hold more than one role.

What are the stakeholders' roles?

As shown in Figure A [1], there are five main stakeholders' roles.

• Developers - are part of the development team, developing products and activities, and determining the vision of the products.
• Shapers - provide input and feedback on product outputs. they can steer the design of elements within the products.
• End-users - use the outputs of the products in the real world.
• Enablers - are capable of helping the product to reach and engage a diversity of other audiences.
• Interested public - generate "bottom-up" support and translate the work to other stakeholders.

A single stakeholder can take up one or more of these roles during product development.

It is important that each role has a purposeful relationship with the product and participates in specific activities to create value for the product.

A stakeholder is anyone who impacts, is impacted by, or perceives to be impacted by the product's decisions, activities, or outcomes.

When stakeholders are not effectively engaged, they will miscommunicate, miss blind spots, and make inaccurate assumptions about a delivery, which prevents the team from delivering valuable software.

The team cannot fulfill stakeholders' needs and expectations or make reliable commitments, as a result, stakeholders lose their trust in the team and feel abandoned.

How do you define stakeholder trust?

Stakeholder trust [2] is a dynamic and multidimensional phenomenon that involves:

• Credibility - refers to how much your stakeholders believe in your expertise and competence.
• Reliability - refers to how consistently you deliver on your promises and expectations.
• Intimacy - refers to how comfortable your stakeholders feel with you and how well you understand their needs and emotions.
• Self-orientation - refers to how much you focus on your interests rather than those of your stakeholders.

Stakeholders lose their trust when the team ignores the above variables or does not know how to deal with the challenges they face to satisfy stakeholders.

Lack of trust makes stakeholders (end-users, shapers) push their requests or a list of features onto the Product Owner (PO).

The contract negotiation takes place here rather than collaboration.

PO promises an upfront delivery date without proper stakeholder engagement to define the product vision and asks for rapid feature delivery without defining the product scope properly.

As a result, he/she becomes aggressive toward their teams and micromanages engineers' activities to keep their promises to stakeholders.

These kinds of pressures on the development team not only undermine the development progress but also do not allow you to regain the stakeholder's trust.

But, how the stakeholder trust can be regained?

The team can restore stakeholders' trust if they empathize with stakeholders, understand their goals, solve their real problems, inform them about existing problems and possible solutions on time, and make them feel like the team is productive.

Therefore, the stakeholders trust can only be earned by effectively engaging stakeholders during product development life cycle and properly managing their expectations.

Throughout the product life cycle, the stakeholders' demands, expectations, frequency of communication, and interest levels vary.

It is vital to know how stakeholder's decision impacts the product and what stakeholders expect from its success or failure.

As a result, a roadmap with a step-by-step approach is imperative to help the team implement a successful stakeholder engagement strategy.

In addition, this roadmap should support an agile way of working to create value during the product development life cycle.

To define this road map, it is important to know the purposes of stakeholder engagement and define specific "calls to action" at a specific moment in time.

Here are some questions that may help you find the appropriate calls to action:

• What are valuable for your product?
• How to inform stakeholders what the team is doing in the long term, what stakeholders should expect, and why?
• What should be the goal and commitment of the team to satisfy the stakeholders' expectations at the end of each Sprint?
• What team must learn from the stakeholder's feedback based on the last iteration's delivery?
• If the stakeholder is unsatisfied with the outcome, what are the reasons? How the team can satisfy stakeholders?
• How to surround team members with the information necessary to steer their work?
• How to inform executives on how the funding is being spent, what results are achieved, and what support is needed to make the team create more success?

You can then refine the purpose of your engagement into multiple engagement objectives. Your stakeholder engagement objectives should be defined by first identifying the stakeholder roles and "calls to action" that are most relevant to you, and then by defining what the added value of the call to action is.

Define stakeholder engagement objective "For my product, the -- stakeholder role -- will -- call to action -- in order to -- added value(s) of engagement --".        

The stakeholder engagement roadmap contains three main phases:

1. Planning the engagement activities for your product.
2. Executing the engagement activity for the specific objectives.
3. Reviewing each engagement activity.

Figure B represents the underlying steps of the stakeholder engagement roadmap. It has the iterative characteristic that enables the team to adapt to new and unforeseen circumstances.

The stakeholders and Scrum team should practice a set of engagement activities. Hence, the engagement roadmap incorporates the collection of good practices.

Those practices must be respected by the team and stakeholders. Otherwise, the facilitator will not be able to facilitate the engagement activity in a way that achieves the desired outcome.

Due to the unpredictable nature of engagement activities, certain risks and challenges must be taken into account, such as unrealistic stakeholders' expectations, the conflict between research benefits, potential harm that may arise for the stakeholders, etc.

For each identified risk or challenge, potential solutions or recommendations should be considered.

SUMMARY

Conducting a stakeholder engagement involves learning the importance of stakeholders and making sure you deliver the desired outcome and expectations for each stakeholder.

Stakeholders lose trust over time as a result of ineffective stakeholder engagement.

Stakeholder engagement is a continuous process that requires constant evaluation and attention.

Defining your stakeholder engagement roadmap and adjusting your actions accordingly is key to effective stakeholder engagement.

Lastly, stakeholder engagement makes sure stakeholders are involved in decision-making, understanding the reasons behind stakeholder resistance, and taking feedback and suggestions from them.

As a result, the team can have the support of stakeholders, minimize their resistance, and prevent misunderstandings.

My next article discusses how to define a planning strategy to help engagement create value.

REFERENCES

[1] Leone, M., Lammens, L. & Callebaut, J. (2021) INTERLACE Stakeholder Engagement Strategy. Deliverable 1.5. INTERLACE project.

[2] https://trustedadvisor.com/why-trust-matters/understanding-trust/understanding-the-trust-equation