Interview business stakeholders

Likely you're engaged in designing and building a piece of software for a business paying for the effort. In many companies the financial approval to build the software came from a group of business stakeholders. In early stages that approval may be just a verbal OK to proceed with gathering information to determine if building the software is a good idea. If the approval to proceed came from a group of people, they all may have slightly different ideas on why the software should be built. It may be a risk to the project to satisfy one business stakeholder, and overlook the concerns of others.

In ideal circumstances business stakeholders could collaborate in a business goal and metric modeling session. This way each stakeholder could learn of each others goals and arrive at a set of goals that best satisfy their personal concerns for the project. However, if the group of business stakeholders is large, or their schedules are difficult, getting their participation in a collaborative modeling session may be difficult.

In some politically charged situations business stakeholders may express one set of goals publicly, but a slightly different set of goals privately. In these circumstances a collaborative modeling session might not result in an outcome that may appear initially to be acceptable to all, but over time as other hidden goals emerge, omissions in product design will also emerge.

It's valuable to get candid complete information from business stakeholders from which to base business goal models on. In addition identifying unstated goals or political risks are helpful in managing an ongoing design and development project.

Use information gathered from these interviews to inform the creation of goal models, risk models, or potentially other models that distill and describe the business context that motivates the design and construction of this software. Information from stakeholder interviews also informs the ongoing project managing the design and construction of the software. Revisiting and re-conducting business stakeholder interviews over time is a good idea as business goals and political landscapes change.

Stakeholder interviews follow the general approach to information acquisition using interviews. When planning and performing business stakeholder interviews follow that general interview approach along with the specific advice below.

Prepare

Identify your interview team

Your team may be just you. In that case, you're done.

Ideally collaborate with at least one other person to pair with while performing interviews and consolidating interview data.

Identify interview candidates.

Your interview candidates should include the business stakeholders that make product and project funding decisions and those that will be involved with ongoing evaluation of the product under design and construction.

When designing and developing software to be used internally inside an organization, consider department heads whose employees will be using the software as business stakeholders, especially if they aren't already involved in ongoing funding and product evaluation decisions.

Also consider anyone else who may advise or give opinions your organization about this product and project.

Finally consider anyone else in your organization that may be important, and/or whose opinion you'd value with respect to this product or project.

Brainstorm a list of interview candidates.

With your interview team collaboratively prioritize these candidates.

Plan and Schedule Interviews

A good time budget for a stakeholder interview would be 15-45 minutes, and no more than an hour.

For each interview, assume 15-30 minutes time will be spent after the interview to review, clean, and consolidate interview notes.

To consolidate interview notes from several interview sessions, assume a collaborative modeling session lasting 90 minutes to 3 hours for 3-5 interviews.

Given these time budgets, decide how many stakeholders you feel you can interview. After conducting some interviews, you can always choose to add more interviews, eliminate some, or change stakeholders you'd like to interview.

Discuss and make notes about the types of questions you'd like interviews to address. Consider the following topics of discussions, and questions to address:

• How will this organization benefit financially from the construction of this project?
• What problems will building this product solve?
• Who will use this product?
• How will you personally be involved with the design, development, evaluation, and use of this product? [break this into several questions.]
• When do you see this product first being released for general use?
• In it's first release, what tangible benefits to the business and/or the users do you expect to realize?
• Ask a remember the future question: "Imagine the software was shipped three month ago. What tangible benefits do you see in the organization today?"

Use these questions as guidelines. Brainstorm about the questions you feel would yield information you can best leverage.

Schedule interviews with your business stakeholders.

Perform interviews

Ideally perform interviews paired.

Inform the stakeholder that the notes you gather will not be published. Summarizations of the information gathered will be used to guide product design decisions. Depending on the business environment, this may or may not be an important disclaimer.

Keep the questions and topics you discussed close by to work them into conversation in a natural way.

Allow the conversation to flow in a natural way to the subject your business stakeholder is most concerned about.

Consider asking remember the future style questions to help your business stakeholder think more tangibly about the outcome of successful product delivery.

Consolidate interview data

Consolidate data across interviews using a collaborative data consolidation session. Consider anonymizing sensitive data.

Retain your original notes for future reference.

If communicating the outcome of this effort is important, prepare a presentable electronic distillation.