Stakeholders and Communication

Understanding stakeholder roles

At first glance, working with stakeholders may not seem to have much need for driving clarity, but this is just as important as the more obvious methodologies we’ve already covered. We think of stakeholders as people or groups we need to communicate statuses to, discuss timelines and blockers with, and so on, and while this is true, they are also great sources of information throughout the project.

In order to get the most out of a stakeholder, you need to fully understand their role in the project or program. Are they merely an interested party, such as a VP of a department, or are they involved in the deliverables directly? If they are involved, what is their role in that involvement? A developer? A manager? A fellow TPM? These questions help determine who your subject matter experts are. A TPM is adept at seeing a problem at multiple levels and can connect one milestone’s problem with surrounding work or even other projects within their department.

Take the Windows Rollout project as an example. When getting ready for execution, the networking risk we discussed earlier may come up in the design. The list of stakeholders may reveal a subject matter expert in networking from within the Windows Rollout project or even across the other projects within the Mercury program. If, for instance, the Android Rollout project has a dedicated networking team—they may be of some assistance given that three out of the four TCP/IP layers (Transport, Internet, and Network layers) are going to be largely common across different application layers, or in our case, operating systems. This could be a chance to combine network specialists across the projects, forming a co-op group to help solve common network issues and ensure consistent network solutions for the program.

Without knowing who your stakeholders are and what their roles are, this type of opportunity to clarify networking requirements and put in place mechanisms to ease the design and implementation may be missed or take a lot longer to piece together than is necessary.

Stakeholder communication for enhanced clarity

There are two avenues where we can drive clarity by communicating with our stakeholders. The figure below shows the relationship between driving clarity and these avenues of communication: