Business Analysis: Master Stakeholder Profiling in 6 Steps

In this pre-recorded training video, you will join Roxanne in the classroom as she gives you a high-level overview of Part One of the Stakeholder Profiling Technique.

A pre-recorded video of live classroom training is presented in this lecture to provide an overview of part two of the stakeholder profiling technique.

The Two Parts and Six Steps of Stakeholder Profiling: 

Part One: Identify Potential Stakeholders

Step One – Review Existing Business Artifacts

Step Two – Brainstorm Topics of Expertise, which focuses on ‘what the who knows’ 

Step Three – List Names of Potential Stakeholders

Part Two: Secure the Stakeholders

Step Four – Survey Potential Stakeholders

Step Five – Analyze Stakeholder Surveys

Step Six – Secure the Stakeholder Resources

In this lecture, we'll explore the meaning of "business models."

Unfortunately, far too often, business models do not exist. So what can you do if no models exist? Develop them, of course!

This job aid describes four core models that Roxanne recommends for all projects.

In the previous module, we discussed the importance of reviewing existing business models and creating a relationship map to understand the scope of your project.

In this module, we will be taking a closer look at part one, step two: brainstorming topics of expertise.

We’ll look at how you can better leverage those business models, and specifically the relationship map that you created from the 45-minute scope interview with the project sponsor or product owner, to more effectively brainstorm topics of expertise.

So what technique should you use to brainstorm topics of expertise?

To have a successful requirements initiative, I often say that it’s not about WHO you know. Rather, it’s about WHAT the who knows. Now I know that the sentence structure of ‘what the who knows’ violates English grammar, and might sound a little funny at first, so let me better define what exactly it means.

When you begin brainstorming for topics of expertise, you should focus first and foremost on the knowledge that you need for your project. Many business analysts make the mistake of jumping straight to identifying WHO they’re going to talk to. I like to refer to this as the “Assumption Trap,” and I will dive into this further in a later lecture.

As we covered in the Requirements Quest Shopping Cart example, I needed someone who knew about, or had the knowledge of Website Administration, Shopping Cart Features, and Online Payment Processing.

So how did I identify these topics of expertise?

I looked at the entities on my relationship map. For example, one of the entities is online payment processor. At a high level, my topic of expertise is online payment processing. Applying the technique, I filled in the blank, I need someone who knows online payment processing.

A common mistake that I see business analysts make is doing an ineffective job in this brainstorming activity, or they skip this activity altogether. I refer to this mistake as the assumption trap.

So how do you know when you have successfully completed step two—brainstorming topics of expertise?

As a general rule of thumb, you will know that you have successfully completed your step two brainstorming activities, when you have identified two to five granular sub-topics for each entity that you identified in your relationship map.

So let’s define the meaning of the word potential.

In reference to this step, the word potential means maybe. It means maybe you’ll use them and maybe you won’t. That is because it depends on the stakeholder’s level of expertise in a particular topic, and their availability to engage in your requirements development activities.

In the previous step, we discussed the brief benefit of assuming who you think has the knowledge of a particular topic as your starting point to identify potential stakeholders. In this lecture, we will be covering how to build your stakeholder survey to confirm actual stakeholders that have the knowledge needed in each topic of expertise. In other words, the stakeholder survey allows you to effectively transition from potential stakeholders to confirmed stakeholders.

Now that you have your survey built, let’s take a look at how you will administer that survey to your potential stakeholders using what I have coined as the 20-minute interview.

Before we begin, I would like to point out that while I call it the 20-minute interview, the reference to 20-minutes is not to be taken literally. Rather, it is named this way to emphasize the casual nature in which I recommend you conduct the interview. Do not pigeonhole yourself to allotting only 20 minutes for these interviews, as they very well could run longer, and most typically will.

Now that you understand the two main objectives to the 20-minute interview, as I covered in the last lecture, let’s dive deeper into some tips and suggestions on how to conduct a successful 20-minute interview.

In this lecture, I am going to briefly present the following tips:

• Do it in person 

• Be prepared 

• Keep it casual 

• Show genuine interest 

• Educate them on the process

  
  

As you may recall from the previous lecture, my fifth and final tip to successfully conducting your 20-minute interview is to take the time to educate your stakeholders.

So, how will you know when step four is complete?

You will know step four is complete when you have identified between two to four stakeholders for each topic of expertise.

After you’ve completed your stakeholder surveys by conducting your 20-minute interviews, in this step, you will compile your survey results, analyzing each topic of expertise to identify stakeholders with a level of knowledge that is either proficient or expert.

Planning your requirements approach using the compiled surveys begins with looking at the total number of topics of expertise. The total number of topics of expertise is your first indicator of the scope and complexity of the requirements development effort. Is this a large project? Medium project? Or small size project?

In the previous lecture we covered how you can use the compiled surveys as a tool to plan and prioritize your requirements development activities with your product owner or project sponsor.

In this lecture we will discuss by way of example, how you can leverage this tool in negotiations to secure resources.

The questions presented in this module are some that I accumulated over years of instructing, coaching, and mentoring business analyst practitioners. Interestingly, the questions are not about the mechanics or steps to building the stakeholder profile. Rather, the questions focus on managing the stakeholders once you identify them, and handling stakeholder availability issues. In some respects, they are even concerned with convincing ‘management’ that the stakeholder profiling technique is a valuable investment of time and resources.

In this section, I want to help you gain confidence in applying the technique, and offer tips for handling some of the sticky ‘people problems’ while managing your stakeholders.

Identify when you start the stakeholder profiling process, as well as when you’re done.

Learn how to deal with stakeholders that claim they know more than they really do on a topic of expertise.

Understand how the stakeholder profiling process helps to overcome situations where a stakeholder underrates their level of knowledge on the topics of expertise.

Gain suggestions for using stakeholder profiling to approach stakeholders that decline your meeting invitations.

Learn how to better deal with stakeholders who truly are too busy to participate in the requirements initiative.

Gain suggestions for using your compiled stakeholder surveys as a tool for approaching the project sponsor or product owner about resource needs.

Discover how stakeholder profiling can help you estimate when you’ll need to engage your stakeholders and for how long.

Hear about one of Roxanne’s success stories from using stakeholder profiling.

Apply a facilitation strategy ("be nice") to manage dysfunctional behavior in your requirements workshops.