Stakeholder accessibility

Look For:

• Engineers complaining over stakeholder accessibility

• Stakeholders complaining over disturbances.

• Design mistakes due to assumptions

Why

The best user representatives are always those important to the business.

In a simple project, their time allocation can be planned, but prioritization can still be problematic when daily responsibilities call. 

In a complex project, you can’t plan when the user representatives, or other key stakeholders for that matter, must be available.

The direct implication is that when clarification is needed, the engineers must wait and replan their tasks. This is not good for performance, but that performance drop is just the tip of the iceberg. The ripple effects are huge, and to avoid going into details, Standish Group has pointed to “decision latency” as the most important parameter to optimize to support performance. 

Leading Principes:

Establish the needed structures to minimize the time elapsed from an engineer's need for clarification until he gets it. This requires prioritizing key employees across more organizational departments and must be established at the appropriate high level.

The Product Owner role is designed to be responsible for this, but exactly that is the greatest problem in practice for the product owner. It’s a great concept, but unfortunately what normally happens is that the appropriate level of management delegates the responsibility to the product owner without delegating the power to access key stakeholders when needed.

Ask for:

Metrics that display decision latency

Incentives for key stakeholders to support the project appropriately.