Example of Strategic Pattern:
Pattern:
Stakeholder team meetings
Brief Description:
A stakeholder meeting is usually a formal meeting of all or most important and interested stakeholders. It can be called for several different reasons
Types of stakeholder meetings:
- Demo/Prototype presentation – This type of meeting involves the stakeholders so that they can assess and review design or progress.
- Information Solicitation - This type of meeting may involve the stakeholders for different reasons. Either because the project team needs to solicit information, like requirements from the stakeholders, or because the stakeholders want to be involved in information solicitation from an important third party.
- Decision making/Project Planning – This type of meeting involves the stakeholders because any major decisions on the project may affect the stakeholder's interests.
- Brainstorming session – On rare occasions, stakeholders may be involved in brainstorming sessions to solve problems or resolve burning issues, which may affect the project delivery.
Brief Description :
In projects where the stakeholders wish to maintain tight control of the progress or to define scope actively, frequent stakeholder meetings may be called for taking major decisions, specially those that would affect multiple teams/parties. This could also be the pattern close to product delivery or launch when important decisions need to be taken.
WHAT
- Team member and stakeholder meetings are held frequently to be able to discuss and review the project scope regularly and make decisions. All affected and interested stakeholders are encouraged to participate.
- This type of communication pattern may be centered around artifacts like project scope or progress plan or projected returns plan. Usually these artifacts are accompanied by a meeting agenda, which might include reviewing the project plan, etc.
Context :
WHERE
- This form of communication is applicable where there is active stakeholder involvement and willingness to meet and make decisions.
- It is almost necessary where the scope of the project is left flexibly defined or when decisions need to be confirmed or reviewed close to launch and more so where the project type is such that market trends might affect launch enormously.
- Frequent stakeholder meetings can be considered useful during the delivery phase of large projects as well, when certain critical time line based decisions may need to be taken, or final consent may be needed to take market delivery based decisions.
WHO
- Stakeholders and either all team members or at least a representatives from each team are typical participants.
- Often, small teams may have no representation in stakeholder meetings if they don't have any say in the decision making process, depending on the model of organization
Style :
HOW
- The style of communication is very formal. Meetings with stakeholder involvement tend to be agenda driven. As stakeholders are usually people in upper management, they tend to also be people who are usually busy, therefore having a prepared agenda is the norm in those meetings.
Goals :
WHY
- The goals of deciding to have stakeholder meetings frequently have to do with closely observing progress and team abilities and consider delivery time lines and prioritize requirements, in the initial phases of the project.
- This allows for good change management, specially where market factors affect delivery and active stakeholder involvement may be considered beneficial.
- If in the beginning, the number of stakeholders is large or if the exact nature and scope of the work is not clear, and project members know that changes in cope can be expected, then to rigidly define the scope and work off of it is not considered prudent, and it is accepted that the scope of the project will be flexibly defined, with room to accommodate new requirements or even completely different work related to the same project, later.
- Sometimes this is done so that the client can evaluate the team's performance on part of the work, and if suitably impressed, later decide to assign more work to them. The decision to meet frequently is to affect identifying changes in scope quickly. Also taking notes during meetings and sharing that with others may be decided based on availability of involved stakeholders.
Benefits Analysis :
- Flexible scope management can be tricky. As good time management is dependent on knowing beforehand the amount and complexity of the work to be undertaken. When the scope of the work is left not clearly defined, then to factor how much time it should take to do the amount of work becomes difficult. Also, if the scope is not clear, it may become difficult to focus and prioritize work.
- Considering the volatile nature of requirements, specially in the software engineering field, it is usually beneficial to keep scope flexibly defined, but being careful of still being able to prioritize, even in the absence of all the requirements.
Risks :
- Having meetings more frequently does not guarantee more decisions being made. Sometimes a communication pattern is noticed where meetings are not very effective. A lot of discussion takes place along with exchange of ideas, but no real decisions get made and the next meeting follows the same pattern where ideas are discussed, but no tangible action is taken.
- As the stakeholders will tend to come from different teams or management positions and may have different goals to meet individually using the project, it may sometimes be difficult to reach consensus on decisions, specially when a compromise or more has to be made.
Example:
Seabase I where in the end of October, the team realized that they have to do design in MATLAB in addition to porting the code from C. Scope change or change in expectations.