The Business Case: Strategies and Technologies for Stakeholder Involvement

A comprehensive business case is a significant tool in project selection and the assessment of investment prospects. It outlines the benefits of a planned project, the intentions addressed by the project, the different actions or conclusions that would accomplish the business objectives, the risks that may influence the project, and the budget of the project. The Business Analyst is often the lead writer of the business case.

Involvement of Stakeholders for creating a Business use case does not happen by chance. This should be planned very well in advance. Business Analyst should know what he/she needs to communicate, what type of questions and which technologies to be presented to the Business user so as to extract exact requirement from them.

Stakeholder’s needs:

A definite decisions that could affect their lives. An assurance that the stakeholder’s contribution will influence the decision on the project’s development. Business Analyst should seek out and facilitate the involvement of those potentially affected stakeholder for that product in development. Plan and execute the input on how they would be participating in determining what they actually need. Provide appropriate information to them so that they would be able to participate and contribute in a meaningful way. Communicate to them how their input would affect the decision and products development.

Tactics for Stakeholder Involvement should be:

Planned:

Most of the people think “Stakeholder involvement” as “Getting requirements”. But the actual illustration is very much different.

Business Analyst needs to plan the cycle of involvement:

He/she need to provide a Vision and problem definition about the project being developed. An Idea to feature view, where the BA is responsible to explain the stakeholder about the idea that would be a good to have feature for that product. He is also responsible for converting the Feature into requirements by asking correct question to the stakeholders. And then finally develop, idea to feature, feature to requirement and requirement to value.

Measured:

The level of stakeholder engagement is a tangible thing:

Business analyst needs to check, if the Stakeholder are satisfied with the product or feature that is being developed or they have any complaints or feedback, which would help BA’s to take appropriate decision. The Number of Stakeholder involved and how many of them have given their feedback is also important. It is also important for Business analyst to keep a check on stakeholder lifecycle participation, this would help them plan any development in advance.

Of all number of needs identified by stakeholders is the very essential, as it would help in prioritizing different set of features that needs to be developed.

Enabled:

Business Analyst has to embed training into his/her plan. They should keep the stakeholder up-to-date by coming back to “you are here” graphic to envision context and focus on what is actually needed.

Let the stakeholders define their needs or scenarios in their own words, this would help in getting what they need and not what they want from the product. BA’s should explain the stakeholders as what they need to prioritize. Stakeholder should be provided with a tool for project transparency, collaboration, and to see how their participation are translated into action

Technologies used for Stakeholder Involvement:

Technology is the enabler. It has to support the stakeholder involvement process. The end-to-end experience in a technology has to be concrete. Business Analyst should always follow the three most important task to avoid confusion while communicating with the stakeholders.

Contribute:

Make it convenient for the stakeholder to find the information, let them contribute, and track change so that they are aware of any changes upfront and are not intimidated.

Be Informed:

Always make it a point to keep all the information on this project in one place so that when the stakeholder wants to check the information they can easily access there.

Provide Oversight:

The BAPM should take a major initiative to involve stakeholder in the process and do management of the project in one place like assigning tasks, overview and tracking of changes, review and approve issues that is critical and comment or give feedback for the issues that would be important to the stakeholder.

When the BA finalizes a technology approach, he/she should think through the entire end-to-end scenario of what the involved stakeholder needs to experience:

• See only what relates to that project.
• Whenever required, the stakeholder can jump into an important feature of what I’m tracking.
• Add a comment or vote for the issue.
• See delivery status on something else that’s important to the stakeholder’s need.
• Get a snapshot of current status which would help the stakeholder to get a view of what is being developed.
• See the drafted requirements for any critical issue.
• Check out a project impact and development.

Business Analyst should always remember the Golden Rules for Stakeholder Involvement Technology:

• Stakeholders have ‘NEEDS’ and they have business scenarios which exist for their business.
• Never force them to define their own requirements, business analyst should ask right question so as to get desired answers for the feature which needs to be implemented.
• They don’t like being asked to do a highly complex tasks which would have little or no immediate payback.
• Never force them to do their own modelling.
• Stakeholders LIKE to contribute, if it’s easy and productive for them.

Generally, stakeholders often have No context for your content. Business Analyst needs to keep this is mind while communication and always remember to communicate project and personal context in every mail that is being sent to the stakeholder.

‘Involvement’ and ‘pushback’ are often the same thing where people that are passively involved are ‘academically interested’ in what you say and people that are actively involved are ‘operationalizing’ in what you say. You need to make your VALUE in the entire process crystal clear.

About the author:

Varun Shimoga is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, he actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. He can be contacted at: varun.shimoga@spluspl.com