TOGAF Knowledge Series #1: Stakeholder Management

Welcome to first post in series which I'm planning to publish periodically to share my understanding of various TOGAF terms, tools and techniques so that many others can use them in day-to-day work.

In this post we will explore a very simple but fundamental topic of "Stakeholder Management". The reason I'm calling this fundamental is, any project we work on is for "others" in very crude terms and if so, entire success of the project is actually dependent on how you engage and manage these "others"! This is the crux of this technique! Sounds interesting? Lets explore more then...

You may ask, this is so basic and fundamental to every project, what does TOGAF or for that matter any other framework / methodology have to offer in this? Everyone almost deals with it anyway in their own way! Well, answer is simple - TOGAF just puts a method around this whole process so that you don't miss anything. When you are able to correctly identify all stakeholders and engage with them appropriately you achieve many crucial benefits (and I'm sure we all have experienced this in our professional life from time to time):

• Key stakeholder inputs go a long way in improving quality of models produced
• Win more resources via support of powerful stakeholders
• Early identification of conflicting / competing objects among stakeholders & develop strategy to resolve issues arising from them

Stakeholder management complexity is directly proportional to the complexity of architectures, simply because those architectures touch large number of stakeholders. I'm of firm opinion that no framework or management technique can give you guaranteed success in matters related to human beings as every person is different and need to be handled in different way. However, having a process and well defined method certainly helps you channelize your efforts correctly. Rest all is your interpersonal skill!!

Before we jump into steps of Stakeholder Management technique as such, lets look at couple of definitions (as defined in TOGAF 9.2 standard):

"Stakeholders": are individuals, teams, organizations, or classes thereof, having an interest in a system.

"Concerns": are interests in a system relevant to one or more of its stakeholders.

Step 1: Identify Stakeholders

Oh well, quite logical, isn't it!! :-)

TOGAF gives a sample stakeholder analysis which distinguishes as many as 22 different types of stakeholders across 5 categories listed below:

• Corporate Functions
• End user organization
• Project Organization
• System Operations
• External

Sample Stakeholders and Categories

These sample stakeholders are just to give you pointers so that you consider all key stakeholders in your planning. Like all other TOGAF material, you can tailor this list - i.e. identify and define your own list of stakeholders. The key here is (and I quote from specification) consider both the Visible team — those obviously associated with the project/change — and the Invisible team — those who must make a real contribution to the project/change for it to be successful but who are not obviously associated with it!

Step 2: Classify Stakeholder Positions

After you have identified all the stakeholders (Note: Stakeholders are initially identified in Phase ~A but also updated throughout each phase), its important to understand their position with respect to architectural work you are doing and their readiness to behave in supportive manner.

This understanding is a key input in determining the strategy to handle each type of stakeholder - either as group or individually.

TOGAF recommends putting this analysis in a tabular form indicating following:

• Stakeholder group
• Stakeholder
• Ability to disrupt change (High / Medium / Low)
• Current & Required Understanding (each as H/M/L)
• Current & Required Commitment (each as H/M/L)
• Required Support (H/M/L)

Step 3: Determine Stakeholder Management Approach

Once the laundry list of all the stakeholders involved has been identified, we need to map them in four quadrants based on their Power and Interest level.

Stakeholder Power Grid

This grid is a very useful tool in channelizing our energy appropriately throughout the project in consistent form of communication.

Step 4: Tailor Engagement Deliverable

This is the last step. Here we ensure that all the outputs produced in the project are suitably addressing the stakeholder concerns. There are different types of outputs as categorized by TOGAF - may be I'll write a separate post explaining each of those types later!

The key thing to keep in mind in this step is - we need to create outputs relevant for the architectural model we are working on in the project and ensuring the same addresses the state concerns of stakeholders for the given architecture. This ensures consistent and commonly understood communication as well.

Apart from these four steps, TOGAF also defines something called as "Template Stakeholder Map" which is nothing but a sample table listing different stakeholder types, their potential concerns, which class of engagement on Stakeholder Power Grid they belong, and which type of output produced will satisfy these concerns.

I will highly recommend you to refer to this map in the specification document and use it for identifying which artifacts would be appropriate to produce while engaging with stakeholders.

That's it for today! I hope to write back on another topic shortly. Till then, please leave your feedback / comments on this post so that it will help me improve on subsequent posts in this series.

Thanks for reading! Hope it helped you in some way!

Reference & Further Reading:
1. The TOGAF? Standard, Version 9.2 (I182M.pdf)
2. Online version: https://pubs.opengroup.org/architecture/togaf9-doc/arch/

Chapter 21. Stakeholder Management