Architectural Stakeholder Analysis – Who Really Cares?

In recent discussions with architecture teams who are working on complex business transformation programs, I heard a common thread come in conversation – the architects were blindsided by individual who were not fully engaged in the architectural development process, but who wielded considerable power to disrupt the project. Human nature being what it is, when individuals in a position of strength feel left out, they can lash out with dire consequences for those around.

So the first question to these architects was to understand how they developed their stakeholder engagement model. In each situation, no formal analysis was performed to determine who all of the key players were and what their interests of those players were. As architects, this should be a critical early activity as we ramp up for an architectural engagement. Why?

Consider how many individual stakeholders could be engaged on a project spanning a single division or beyond. Now consider how many individual stakeholders, by themselves, could either sabotage the entire architectural process or consume a disproportionate amount of the project resources. Both of these outcomes could be disastrous for the project, our relationship with the project sponsor and our credibility as an architecture practice. A formal analysis of stakeholders removes many of these concerns by

• Confirming all of the key stakeholders and their relationships within the firm
• Helping understand the relative power of those stakeholders to support or disrupt the project
• Understanding how those individuals like to be engaged and what personal motivations they may have for seeing the project complete successfully or fail Having completed the analysis, we should then be able to
• Determine an appropriate engagement model (high tough/frequent, low touch, face to face, email only etc) for each of the key stakeholders, based on their relative interests
• Determine an appropriate communication format (level of detail, delivery approach etc) for each, and Perhaps most importantly, properly estimate the amount of project effort and resources will be required for proper engagement, and plan accordingly.