A stakeholder in a project (e.g., a customer) is anyone who is impacted by the project. Some of the stakeholders include Customers, Project sponsor, Project leaders, Development team, Vendors, End users. The most important stakeholders are the customers or users of the product being developed.
Stakeholder satisfaction is an important goal for the project team and can determine the success or failure of the project.
Identifying and engaging current and future stakeholders requires soft skills and leadership. Leaders should strive to facilitate stakeholder engagement and collaboration throughout the project lifecycle and provide the tools for effective and informed decision making.
This requires building an environment of trust, aligning stakeholder needs and expectations, and balancing their requirements with an understanding of the associated costs/expenses.
Top related Tools and techniques of Stakeholder Engagement
It is critical that agile teams first identify the right (legitimate) stakeholders and understand and analyze their needs, wants, wishes, and priorities.
Communication plays an important role between agile teams, in particular in conveying messages and agile planning. The effectiveness and complexity of communication depends on various factors such as the number of participants, the size of the team, the environment, and the seating arrangement of the participants.
Innovation games (aka. collaborative games) refer to a form of exercise and group work in which customers or agile teams generate ideas or feedback through a series of directed games to solve complex problems or gather requirements for products or services.
Brainstorming is a method design teams use to generate ideas to solve clearly defined design problems. In controlled conditions and a free-thinking environment, teams approach a problem by such means as “How Might We” questions. They produce a vast array of ideas and draw links between them to find potential solutions.