Understanding project sociology by modeling stakeholders

We have been collaborating on ways to improve how we involve stakeholders in projects. Here, we summarize the approach we've been taking to discover the right stakeholders and maintain their involvement. All the projects that we work on seem to have one thing in common: developers are concerned about the difficulty of involving the right stakeholders to discover, specify, and test requirements. We ran the stakeholder concerns survey to better understand what people mean when they say, "We have a problem with our stakeholders." We asked each participant to choose one stakeholder concern that causes the biggest problem in his or her environment. The objective was to discover which concerns are the most frequent and where we should focus our improvement efforts. Missing stakeholders result in missing requirements and escalating project costs. Once we've analyzed our project using a combination of onion models and stakeholder analysis templates, our project sociology modes become a tool for monitoring the continuing involvement of the appropriate stakeholders and dealing with changes.