Business Analysis: Building Better Stakeholder Relations

The Business Analysis: building better stakeholder relations through prototyping article, published on Justinmind blog, discusses 6 tactics that can help Business Analysts create good stakeholder relationships throughout the software development lifecycle. One of them involves incorporating excitement requirements to increase stakeholder satisfaction:

Yes, it is possible to get your stakeholders to do more than merely validate your requirements; you can get them excited by ‘excitement requirements’. Excitement requirements are “those that customers did not think of, or even think were possible.” Using the example of a word processing app that imports stencils like a modelling tool to explain excitement requirements: stakeholders don’t expect to be able to draw with their word processors, so when they do, they’re happy - Business Analyst Learnings
You’ve created a positive point around your requirements and given the product a competitive lead. What’s not to get excited about?

Having a product with excitement requirements fulfilled can increase customer satisfaction to a large extent, but will not cause dissatisfaction if they’re absent. See Applying the Kano Analysis Model to Requirements Identification & Prioritization.

Other conditions that can help stakeholder relations include:

  1. Communications planning matrix
  2. Agile requirements management using collaborative technology
  3. Open dialog between developers and stakeholders
  4. Soft skills
  5. Requirements management

Read more about the 5 remaining factors for improving stakeholder relations at this link.

Picture Attribution: “Hands Community Represents Organized Group And Altogether” by Stuart Miles/Freedigitalpotos.net