Dr. Dobb's is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.


Channels ▼
RSS

Security

The SPAMMED Architecture Framework


Identify Stakeholders

Identifying a project's stakeholders and their concerns, agendas, and needs is the first task architects should perform when starting on new projects.

Who are stakeholders? They are the people who have some vested interest in the project. Naturally there are many stakeholders with any project—customers, targeted end users, operations (IT), developers, maintainers, management, testers, and so on. Stakeholders also include the architects themselves.

It is important to catalog project stakeholders, as the architect's role is to strike a balance between the (sometimes conflicting) concerns and agendas of stakeholders versus the project's functional/nonfunctional requirements. Stakeholder needs/concerns can impact the architecture. The most obvious example is a time constraint; for instance, "finish the project in two months or don't do it at all." Such constraints are bound to have an affect on the possible complexity of the architecture.

The place to start is to build a mental model of the stakeholders in the project. Keep in mind that the reality is that not all stakeholders necessarily want the project to succeed. You can map the stakeholders by their interest in the project, their power, and the importance of their concerns. As a rule, you should closely manage the stakeholders who have lots of interest in the project and who can influence its success. Keep stakeholders who have low interest but high influence satisfied; keep the stakeholders who are interested but have low influence informed, and monitor the rest (see "Another View at Enterprise Architecture Viewpoints," by J. Schekkerman; www.enterprise-architecture.info/Images/ExtendedEnterprise/E2A-Viewpoints_IFEAD.PDF).


Related Reading


More Insights






Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

Dr. Dobb's encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, Dr. Dobb's moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing or spam. Dr. Dobb's further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

 
Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.