Who are your stakeholders in Agile projects?

Again I have a slightly different view than the others who have posted on linked in before so I hope you find my input valuable.

Firstly lets define what we are talking about when we use the term stakeholder:

The PMBOK which is a widely respected project management source of information defines a stakeholder as:

Stakeholder: An individual, group or organisation who may affect, be affected by, or perceive itself to be affected by a decision, activity or outcome of the project.

You could visualize the above something like this:

With an accurate definition of what a stakeholder is lets explore the concept in relation to agile projects.

Like with all projects including the ones run using agile methodologies the stakeholders can be either internal or external to your business.

Internal stakeholders are often from various parts of the organisation.

Some examples of internal stakeholders would be:

• Product Owners
• Product champions
• Different departments
• Marketing and sales personnel
• Project sponsors
• Management teams
• Customer support staff
• Manufacturing
• Testing and quality assurance
• Legal and Compliance
• Different development teams
• Different stack level developers
• DevOps teams
• DBA and Infrastructure teams

Some project stakeholders are internal to the project such as developers, product owner and technical architects etc.. The other internal stakeholders are often dependant or reliant on the project outcome to operate or function in there area of responsibility within the business. This is ultimately what makes them a stakeholder.

The variety and large number of internal stakeholders are one of the reasons agile methodologies have become so successful in recent years.

Having many different departments with far reaching responsibilities relying on your project outcome is quite a burden for your project and the organisation as a whole.

Agile methodologies aim to relieve some of this burden by prioritising incremental delivery.

Why does incremental delivery reduce the burden?

By delivering to internal stakeholders incrementally we reduce the delay between idea and delivery. This affords our project and the organisation the ability to adjust there planning and there plans.

The increase in planning adds overhead but the result of updating plans more often leads to better and more accurate plans across the organisation as a whole and this is often where the real benefits are felt.

The benefactors of these changes in internal processes are ultimately the external stakeholders of the business.

Some examples of external stakeholders would be:

• Customers
• Re-sellers
• Affiliates
• Integration partners
• Industry partners
• Suppliers
• Industry journalists
• Regulatory agencies

It is these external stakeholders who receive the greatest benefits from internal process agility. Especially when the agility is being perpetuated across the organisation with PDCA cycles.

Your ability to respond to market threats, technological innovations and customer demands will ultimately decide your success as a business.

With this in mind being able to deliver on your promises to the external stakeholders sooner than your competitors will help you to stand out and likely lead to a prosperous outcome for all involved.

Hopefully this helps, Good Luck

Oliver Dolan

https://www.oliverdolan.com