Introducing the stakeholders,
The day begins
| Nancy | Bobbi arrives at the office, grabs a cup of coffee, sits down and reads her email. |
| Bobbi | hmm… There is a note from Valerie, the VP Operations. She wants to see me at 10am this morning to discuss a new project. Guess, I’ll need to reschedule the brainstorming meeting that I had planned with Chang and Cara from Customer Support. I wonder what this new project is about? I better bring my notebook so that I can take notes during the discussion. |
In Valerie’s office with William and Patricia
| Valerie | Good morning everyone. Thanks for joining me on such short notice. |
| Valerie | I was reviewing the numbers from last month. The number of delayed shipments is twice what it was last month, and the duration of the delay is 3 times a long as two months ago. William, tell me what’s going on in the warehouse? |
| William | Valerie, it’s simple. The inventory management and supply chain management processes just can’t keep up. The books are flying off the shelves. We don’t get shipments when the suppliers promise. And the quantities received are often too small to address the backlog. There is a disconnect between what we need, what we get, and when we get it. |
| Patricia | Well, we’ve held out as long as we could with an inventory management system that is disconnected from our supply chain. Perhaps we need to upgrade. Bobbi, I want you to do some preliminary investigation to evaluate our options. Patricia, I’d like you to be the Project Manager on this initiative. Please work with Bobbi to develop the preliminary approach for the project. |
| Patricia | Let’s meet again in two weeks to discuss our options. Following that, depending upon the scope of the initiative, I’ll have to present a business case with the recommendation to my peers on the Senior Management Team, to get approval for the project to go forward. |
Bobbi and Patricia meet in a nearby collaboration area to discuss Bobbi’s approach
| Bobbi | This sounds like a big and important project. | |
| Patricia | Yes indeed. This is a big step for us. So, tell me, how you want to approach this? | |
| Bobbi | Well, as always, I need to figure out who our stakeholders are. Then, I need to plan what questions I need to ask each stakeholder. I need to confirm that William’s assessment is accurate, and if it is, then I need to engage people to determine our options. After we’ve identified the major options, then we’ll do a qualitative assessment of each option to narrow down our choices, pick the top three, and then do a more detailed assessment of each option. | Plan BA Approach |
| Bobbi | I doubt that I’ll have time to do a full options analysis in two weeks, but I should be able to come up with the top three choices so that we can present them to Valerie and get her opinion on which ones we should investigate further. | |
| Patricia | That sounds like a good approach. I’m going to begin putting together a project charter and other foundation documents for a new project. | |
| Patricia | Say, the list of stakeholders that you will consult is probably a subset of the list of stakeholders for the entire project. Why don’t we do some preliminary brainstorming together to come up with the list of stakeholders. | Plan Stakeholder Engagement |
| Bobbi | Great idea. |
Bobbi and Patricia brainstorm a set of stakeholders.
| Patricia | This is a great list Bobbi. Thanks for working with me on this. I’ll be in touch in a few days to see how things are going. | |
| Bobbi | You’re welcome Patricia. I’m going to get to work planning how I will engage the stakeholders. Before you go, I wanted to confirm the governance model with you. | |
| Patricia | I suspect that there will be several levels of governance, with different people responsible for different components. | |
| Bobbi | It is likely that someone from inventory management and supplier relations will be the primary approver of the functional requirements. Of course, IT will want to have their hand in defining and approving requirements related to the operations, maintainability, and scalability of the solution. And once we have the general solution requirements approved, as Valerie suggested, the entire project including detailed budget and schedule will need to go to the Senior Management Team for approval. So, as you can see, there are multiple layers of governance. | Plan BA Governance |
| Patricia | Thanks Patricia. |
Back at Bobbi’s desk
| Bobbi | I’ll start by reviewing the list of stakeholders that I developed in conversations with Patricia. I’ll identify how best to engage them and who I should meet with first. Farouk ,the VP finance, is a busy fellow, but I know that I will need to talk with him to understand the financial impact of the inventory problems. I’ll also need to setup a time to have a video conference with a few suppliers. I should also visit the team in IT, in the basement. There is no point in setting up a meeting with them, because they only watch their email once a day. I’ll go visit them instead. | Plan Stakeholder Engagement |
| Bobbi | Now, before I get too far along on this project, I’ll set up a a new module in our requirements management system so that I can capture the thoughts and ideas as I learn them. | Plan BA Information |
| Bobbi | I’ll link them to the Project Information Page that Patricia will be setting up. | |
| Bobbi | I’m sure glad that Patricia and I worked to set up this system a year ago. It has made requirement management, communication, and collaboration so much easier. | BA Performance Improvements |