Tactics and Technologies for Stakeholder Engagement

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With Keith Ellis CEO, SpokenSage

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What are we going to talk about?

Engagement does not happen by chance What should you communicate? What Questions What Technologies What works?

About Enfocus Solutions

Business Analysis and Requirements Management

About Keith Ellis

Author of The Business Analysis Benchmark Example projects Ive lead:
o Modernization of UI Tax and Benefit Systems: 4 states simultaneously needing over 100 business and 50 technical stakeholders to create a DOL standard o Implementing Centers of Excellence o Mentoring analyst leadership

Built and sold a requirements definition and management (RDM) company Something in excess of 60,000 people have listened to my webinars on aspects of RDM Msc in Computer Science from Lancaster University as a result of research in RDM
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Learning Objectives
What tactics can be used to gain stakeholder interest and open them to engagement? How do you improve the dynamics of the relationship through enhanced communication and shared practices What key questions are essential for the analyst to ask? What technologies can be used to support stakeholder collaboration
5.1 5.2 5.5 10.3 10.4

In PMBOK
Collect requirements Define Scope Control Scope Distribute Information Manage Stakeholder Expectations

QUESTION: What is the difference between Stakeholder Communication and Stakeholder Engagement

Communication versus Stakeholder Engagement

Stakeholder engagement is:

Planned
Measured

Enabled
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Stakeholders want (golden rules):

A say in decisions that could affect their lives. A promise that the stakeholders contribution will influence the decision. Seek out and facilitate the involvement of those potentially affected. Input on how they participate. Information they need to participate in a meaningful way. Communicate how their input affected the decision.
Adapted from Core Values for the Practice of Public Participation by the International Association for Public Participation
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Stakeholder Engagement Tactics:

For Planning For Measuring Engagement For Enabling Engagement

Stakeholder Engagement is Planned

When you think Stakeholder Engagement, most people think: o Getting requirements Plan your cycle of engagement: o Vision and problem definition o Ideation to feature o Feature to requirements o Requirements to value

Broaden the Perspective on the Stakeholders to Engage

There is a tendency to focus on and engage stakeholders that are already engaged or interested:

o Keep Satisfied: Low interest stakeholders with high organizational power. o Keep Informed: Higher impacted stakeholders with lower organizational power. o Keep Monitoring: General SMEs and contributors, while always watching for related projects.

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Stakeholder Engagement is Measured

The level of stakeholder engagement is a tangible thing:
Stakeholder satisfaction (or complaints) Number of stakeholder comments received Stakeholder lifecycle participation Number of participating stakeholders Stakeholder attendance percentage Number of needs identified by stakeholders
Some Example Techniques Retrospectives Gather Statistics Surveys Task Participation Learning Participation

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Stakeholder Engagement is Enabled

Embed training into your plan Keep coming back to a you are here graphic to visualize context and focus Have stakeholders describe needs or scenarios in their own words Be clear that stakeholders must prioritize Providing tooling for project transparency, collaboration, and to see how their participation translated into action

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Tooling Provides Engagement Advantages

Common repository Dashboards Task lists Voting Recording needs and scenarios

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Improving Relationship Dynamics

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Practices to Remember
Stakeholders often have NO context for your content:
o Keep this in mind when communicating ALWAYS communicate project and personal context (WIIFM) in every message

Engagement and pushback are often the same thing:

o People that are passively engaged are academically interested in what you say. o People that are actively engaged are operationalizing what you say.

Make your VALUE in the process clear.

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How Business Analysts Deliver Value

Copyright 2013 Enfocus Solutions Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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What questions are essential for the analyst to ask?

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Early in the Project lifecycle

Look for the governance (compliance, legal, management) or financial stakeholder involvement:
o When scheduling an appointment in this clinical care system, are there conditions under which compliance, legal or management need to be informed?

Look for the ways other staff groups augment a process:

o I see that marketing is involved in setting pricing for promotions, are there other things that marketing needs to do for sales or operations as it relates to this catalogue system?

Look for the power base:

o Weve seen four types of benefits: reducing staff time, delivering higher data quality, increasing conversion speed, decreasing conversion cost: Who would own each of those benefits? Why is that outcome a good thing for them?

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Mid-cycle: Prioritization and Quick Wins

Get people thinking about development as a balance between met and unmet needs:
o What needs are met by these requirements? Whats unmet and can we live with that?

People overlook the simple questions that absolutely make a project:

o What are our quick wins?

People overlook asking about risk and removing barriers:

o What would prevent us from achieving the business outcome?

When people ask about prioritization, they often prioritize the wrong thing.
o Prioritize at the feature level, not requirements

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Late Stage: Maximize VALUE (but minimize productivity drop)

ASK EARLY AND OFTEN: Solution assessment and validation:
o Does the solution address the requirements we defined? - How am I going to make that decision? Where am I going to have stakeholders involved? - Structured walkthrough - Evaluate solution against benchmark o Is this solution delivering against what was expected.

Value realization:

o What else can be done to deliver more value to the business

Setting transition requirement details get stakeholder input:

o Training, data conversion, user set-up, deployment, production management, etc. o How do we minimize distraction to the business in this transition?

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Technologies for Stakeholder Collaboration

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Basic Stakeholder Needs

Technology is the enabler It has to support the stakeholder engagement process

Contribute: Make it easy for me to find information, contribute, and track change so Im not intimidated. Be Informed: Put all the information on this project in one place so Im encouraged to go there. Provide Oversight: Let me do all my management of this project in one place: assign tasks, overview/track, review/approve, comment/ feedback.

The end-to-end experience in a technology has to be solid

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When you approach technology think through the end-to-end scenario of what the engaged stakeholder needs to experience
See only what relates to me

Jump into an important feature Im tracking

Add a comment or vote

See delivery status on something else thats important to me

Get on with my day

Get a snapshot of status See the drafted requirements Check out a project impact to my role
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Golden rules for stakeholder collaboration technology

Stakeholders have NEEDS and they have business scenarios which exist for their business
o Stay away from forcing them to define their own requirements.

Stakeholders do not like being asked to do highly complex tasks which have little immediate payback.
o Stay away from forcing them to do their own modelling.

Stakeholders LIKE to participate if its easy and productive

o Remember how we defined productive?
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Stakeholders want (golden rules):

A say in decisions that could affect their lives. A promise that the stakeholders contribution will influence the decision. Seek out and facilitate the involvement of those potentially affected. Input on how they participate. Information they need to participate in a meaningful way. Communicate how their input affected the decision.
Adapted from Core Values for the Practice of Public Participation by the International Association for Public Participation

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Learning Objectives
What tactics can be used to gain stakeholder interest and open them to engagement?
In PMBOK

How do you improve the dynamics of the relationship through enhanced communication and shared practices What key questions are essential for the analyst to ask?

5.1 5.2 5.5 10.3 10.4

Collect requirements Define Scope Control Scope Distribute Information Manage Stakeholder Expectations

What technologies can be used to support stakeholder collaboration

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Wrap Up and A Word From Our Sponsor

Call for tools for business analysis and requirements management, and, the RequirementCoach community

www.enfocussolutions.com

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Reaching Keith (slides): ellis.in.toronto@gmail.com 416-816-5982

Discussion

Andrea Palten apalten@enfocussolutions.com

To claim your PDU Credits, please visit: http://www.pmi.org PDU Credits: 1 Credit (Category A) Provider ID: 1811 (Diversified Business Communications) Title: Tactics and Technologies for Stakeholder Engagement Program ID WID00094 Notice from IIBA: The content of the course is aligned with the BABOK CDU Credits: 1 CDU towards CBAP recertification. EEP ID: E57363

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