Background of the Stakeholder Concerns Survey

Suzanne Robertson

The Atlantic Systems Guild

suzanne@systemsguild.com

We often hear that people are concerned about the difficulty of involving the right stakeholders in discovering and specifying the requirements. The problems that we hear about most often are:

• People with authority (business and technical managers) do not commit enough time/budget for requirements.
• The stakeholders do not have the skills necessary to participate in the business of gathering requirements, they describe solutions not requirements and they change their minds.
• We can't discover who are the appropriate stakeholders, it's very difficult to find all the people who need to be involved in the process of discovering, inventing and specifying requirements
• We can't keep the stakeholders interested and involved for the duration of the project.

We ran the Stakeholder concerns survey with groups from 8 different countries during the period from November 2001 to March 2002. We asked each participant to choose which one of the stakeholder concerns was the most important in his/her environment. The objective was to discover which of the concerns are the most frequent and where we should aim to make improvements.

The results are summarised in the table. 38% of respondents said that stakeholders are lacking in skills. Maybe we need to find ways to give the stakeholder more skills or maybe we need better techniques to overcome the lack of skills. The other most common response, 34% of respondents, pointed to lack of commitment. Perhaps this points to the necessity of ways to quantify and communicate the business value of investing in requirements. Percentages concerned with discovering stakeholders were 13% and maintaining involvement 9%. Of the 5% who gave the answer "other" the most common reason was lack of communication between stakeholders.

We shall use the results of this survey as input and guidance to our future research and to the further development of the Project Sociology aspects of Volere. We would appreciate your comments and requirements.

	Commitment	Skill	Discovery	Maintaining	Other	Total
Germany Nov 2001	18	40	14	3	7	82
Australia Nov 2001	11	5	0	2	0	18
Australia Dec 2001	10	14	5	4	0	33
Denmark Jan 2002	37	39	4	1	7	88
UK February 2002	14	6	4	1	0	25
Denmark Jan 2002	4	7	5	1	0	17
Netherlands March 2002	10	12	4	4	1	31
Australia April 2002	13	3	16	8	2	42
Australia April 2002		6	5	5		16
USA April 2002	26	27	4	5	6	68
Italy May 2002	3	4	3	4		14
Finland May 2002	40	45	8	10	4	107
Total	186	208	72	48	27	541
Percentage of Total	34	38	13	9	5	100