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The value of Stakeholder Perspectives
Let me set the scene. Your customer (internal or external) requests a new capability. You set to work determining how to achieve it, potentially by modifying existing systems, introducing new tools, or integrating both.
You’ve made several plans, consulted with vendors and your team. Now it’s time to present and get the ship moving. You organize several workshops to distil the change to varying IT teams and the obligatory presentation back to the board on timelines and expenditure.
Although the objectives and milestones are clear in your mind and a few others it’s time to face the challenge of ensuring stakeholders understand the priority and impact of IT change. Communicating IT change effectively to technical and non-technical audiences can be difficult…
Introducing Stakeholder Roles and Viewpoint Perspectives
I’m going to assume here that you have prepared a set of diagrams, charters and other supporting materials to help you... If you have not, this is Step One!
You will find this essential for articulating and aligning change initiatives and strategies. Without it, presenting changes to stakeholders becomes complex, as gaps and impacts remain unclear or misinterpreted.
Each stakeholder has different needs and perspectives. The magic ingredient is a central IT repository; one that contains your target architecture and allows the filtering of artifacts to be tailored to show not just the project delivery, but differing stakeholders providing increased visibility in areas for those stakeholders that require it whilst dumbing it down to a view for those that perhaps don’t care so much about the detail.
Let’s look an example of Stakeholder Perspective within IT.
IT Stakeholder Role Perspectives:
Product Owners focus on the Capability gap and how it’s being fulfilled without duplicating existing functionality.
Business Analysts focus on the business needs, requirements and interactions.
Cloud Architects or Infrastructure Managers prioritize technical aspects, such as cloud architecture, over business capability management, etc.
Solution Architects analyse dependencies and technical components to ensure system cohesion and functionality.
What do you see?
By offering role-specific viewpoints, each user can easily access relevant data without being overwhelmed by unrelated information. This boosts collaboration and you will find higher engagement due to the clarity around the stakeholders understanding.
Organizational Role Stakeholder Perspectives
Let’s look at perspectives from functional departments.
IT Teams need insights into implementation, integration, maintenance, supporting, requirements and a view across existing capabilities.
Finance Departments focus on costs, ROI, and financial commitments.
Operations Teams assess the overall impact on business functions.
Despite these differing paradigms each still wants to understand what they are getting at the end of it but with a twist on content and detail.
Conclusion
A structured approach to IT change, containing target architecture artifacts and Stakeholder and Viewpoint aligned to documentation enhances clarity, communication and stakeholder buy-in. This approach fosters smoother transitions and long-term success whilst building a robust set of supporting artifacts that can be re-used for the next change.Download
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We would welcome your feedback! Contact Enterprise Modelling and we'll keep you posted with every update and reach out to offer assistance on your journey.
