Roles defined
Stakeholders have typically been divided into business and delivery communities; these are called 'silos' and are implicated in ineffective waterfall practice. Many organisations prefer the terms 'Demand' and 'Supply' to represent the true nature of the relationship between the operational business and the capability to satisfy needs expressed in an I.T. solution (not solely, but often).
This diagram illustrates the demand and supply communities and shows how the Agile team is made up of people from both. The P2 term for the Project Customer is the Senior Responsible Owner.
Typical stakeholder goals
- Senior managers: Interested in the big picture; in the vision and the strategy necessary to deliver the vision. Interested in budgets.
- Project sponsor: responsible for representing the strategic vision to the tactical business, and the progress of the project to the senior management team. A role that gets uncomfortable when progress is slow and difficult as budgets swell.
- Middle manager: Responsible for 'business as usual' and the management of programmes (groups of related projects)
- Project customer (Senior Responsible Owner): the person who acts as a proxy for the Project sponsor (who is often not available on a daily basis).
- Users: the people inside the organisation who will use the new system
- Customers: the people outside the organisation who will ultimately benefit from the new system.
- Project manager: the person who monitors and encourages project 'flow'.
- Technologist: system analysts, architects, designers, programmers and testers.
- Business analyst: broken out for special attention from the wider technologists because requirements are really important.