How to Identify Stakeholder Requirements (With Examples)
Have you been asked to put together a list of stakeholder requirements for an upcoming project? Or perhaps you’re an engagement professional or project manager looking for some ideas to improve your requirements gathering process?
This guide sets some clear definitions for stakeholder requirements, along with why they’re so important in project planning and some practical steps to gather your requirements and apply them.
What are Stakeholder Requirements?
Stakeholder requirements refer to the things that your stakeholders need — either from your project, your organization, or the consultation process itself. These needs could be related to solving a problem, supporting a goal, meeting certain conditions, or overcoming a concern.
Remember: a stakeholder refers to a person, group, or organization that is impacted by, has an influence on, or an interest in your organization, project, or work.
It’s worth mentioning that you may come across both implicit and explicit stakeholder requirements:
- Explicit requirements can be expressed directly, clearly, and simply.
- Implicit requirements may be assumed, implied, or hinted at.
For example, a stakeholder may state explicitly that they’re happy for your housing development project to go ahead as long as you reserve 30% parkland for wildlife. But they may have assumptions or implicit requirements that they don’t state, such as being regularly updated about the project — and if you don’t meet these requirements, you’ll fail to gain their support.
Stakeholder Requirements vs Business Requirements
To build on our definition of stakeholder requirements, it’s helpful to touch on some differences between terms that are often used interchangeably. In some project planning processes (especially IT projects), you might hear the term business requirements used instead of stakeholder requirements. However, this term only refers to the goals or objectives of the organization, which typically come from specific internal stakeholders within the business (owners, directors, managers, and shareholders).
Stakeholder requirements refer to the needs of various stakeholder groups and individuals, which may encompass internal business stakeholders, internal/external IT team, end users, and other stakeholder groups (depending on the project).
However, when you implement best practice stakeholder engagement, your business requirements and project plans should naturally take into consideration the goals and needs of key stakeholders, as well as the broader situation and environment the project needs to operate within. For example, time constraints, technology requirements, training/upskilling, resources/budget, competition, and legislation.
The Importance of Stakeholder Requirements
Stakeholder requirements are a crucial piece of the puzzle, enabling accurate project planning that sets you up for success. They’re important for:
- Defining the project: Working with key stakeholder groups to define project goals, objectives, and deliverables
- Understanding stakeholders: The process of gathering requirements can help you deepen your understanding of stakeholders
- Managing risk: By identifying what matters to stakeholders from the start, you can minimize the risk of conflict and delays
- Getting participation: By bringing stakeholders into your process from the start, you’ll give them a sense of ownership, increase their buy-in, and start to build relationships with them
- Increasing satisfaction: When you demonstrate that you care about the needs of stakeholders (and especially when you meet those needs), they’re more likely to be satisfied
- Ensuring compliance: If you strategically engage with regulators and legal experts early on, you can make sure your project checks all the boxes
- Designing effective solutions: The more information you can gather from stakeholders, the better-informed your solutions will be — and the more likely they’ll be practical, sustainable, and effective
How to Uncover Stakeholder Requirements
You’ll be able to uncover most stakeholder requirements through a detailed stakeholder analysis. So, let’s break down some of these steps, then how you can apply these requirements to your project and consultation process.
Identify Key Stakeholders
Before you can analyze your stakeholders, you’ll first have to identify who they are and what their characteristics are so that you can determine your key stakeholders to prioritize and engage with. Some of your stakeholders might be impacted by your project, some might have the ability to influence it, and others may only have an interest in it. And some might be all of the above. You might have internal stakeholders (inside your organization) and external stakeholders (outside of your organization).
To identify your stakeholders, look at who you’ve interacted with previously and chat to others on the project team to find out who they’ve interacted with. Plus, you should consider the groups, businesses, and individuals located near the project. Add these to your stakeholder register, along with their characteristics, relationships, contact details, and any other information that might be relevant. You’ll be able to use this data to conduct stakeholder mapping so you can prioritize stakeholders according to the characteristics that are most meaningful to your project (like impact, influence, interest, criticality, position, and effort).
Stakeholder lists may change over time — you’ll likely discover new stakeholders once you begin the project, and your priorities will likely evolve, too. But this initial process will give you a solid starting point!
Develop an Engagement Plan
Creating a stakeholder engagement plan will help you be more strategic about communicating with stakeholders to gather their requirements. In it, you can outline:
- Who your stakeholders are
- What you hope to achieve from the engagement
- Details from your analysis and mapping
- Any engagement activities you’ll undertake
- How you’ll measure and report on the engagement
Your engagement activities are where you’ll do most of your stakeholder requirement gathering. The best approach will depend on the stakeholder group you’d like to target — a tailored approach is always best. But some popular methods include one-on-one interviews, surveys, focus groups, workshops, field observations, and events. As long as the activity allows you to connect with stakeholders, ask relevant questions, and get their answers down on paper (or in your stakeholder software!), it can be a valid method for gathering requirements.
Elicit Stakeholder Input
This step involves implementing the engagement activities in your plan that are specific to gathering requirements from stakeholders. These will generally happen early in the consultation process. Reach out to stakeholders to inform them about opportunities to participate in engagement activities, whether it’s booking a meeting, attending an event or group, or filling out a questionnaire.
To increase the likelihood of stakeholders responding and participating, be sure to tailor your outreach as much as possible. Choose the stakeholder communication channels they prefer, highlight how they can benefit from responding, and demonstrate how their response can have an impact.
Gather Stakeholder Requirements
Next, you’ll need to note down each response from stakeholders so that you can analyze the requirements, set priorities, and create stakeholder alignment. If you’re recording these responses in a stakeholder management platform like Simply Stakeholders, you can use qualitative analysis tools to automatically analyze survey responses, emails, documents, and more to determine sentiment, issues, and themes. Otherwise, you’ll need to manually analyze or categorize stakeholder requirements.
It’s common for stakeholders to have different requirements that may even conflict with one another (and with the goals of your business or project). If this happens, you’ll need to consider which needs to prioritize based on your earlier stakeholder mapping, as well as the practical reality of meeting some requirements over others. You may find that some stakeholders will need to compromise on or let go of certain requirements.
Document Stakeholder Requirements
You’ll need to document any stakeholder requirements as you discover them. If you don’t have a tool like Simply Stakeholders, use a spreadsheet to keep track of any requirements and associate them with specific stakeholders.
By recording everything clearly, you’ll be able to show stakeholders that you listened to their needs and carefully considered their requirements, as well as the process you went through to reach a final decision. And you’ll be able to create a source of truth for your internal team so that you each have accurate, up-to-date information to engage with stakeholders.
Some organizations and projects may also need to document this data to meet legislative and regulatory requirements for identifying stakeholders’ needs. In some cases, you may need to show evidence that you’ve considered the capacity of stakeholders to identify their requirements (and made accommodations accordingly). For example, if some of your stakeholders have lower literacy levels, does your engagement allow them to properly identify their own needs?
Monitor Stakeholder Satisfaction
Lastly, it’s a good idea to track and evaluate your engagement in light of stakeholder requirements. In particular, stakeholder satisfaction can be a good indicator of whether or not you’ve accurately identified stakeholder requirements and met the expectations of your stakeholders. If you notice a drop in satisfaction metrics, it might mean there’s a new conflict or unmet need that must be identified and resolved.
Tools like sentiment analysis, relationship health scoring, and satisfaction ratings in questionnaires can help you track stakeholder satisfaction over time.
Remember to Balance Individual and Collective Requirements
One final (but important) tip: it’s normal to experience some conflict when it comes to identifying and prioritizing stakeholder requirements. Sometimes the needs or goals of an individual or group will clash with the needs or goals of the project, or the majority of your stakeholders.
Your job isn’t to make everyone happy — that would be an impossible task!
But you will need to:
- Value and recognize the input of all stakeholders
- Identify the collective themes that come from gathering stakeholder input
- Consider how you’ll set priorities
- Decide what needs to change
- Work with stakeholders to help them find common ground
- Foster collaboration, respect, and understanding
It’s not an easy job to balance individual and collective needs, but it can make all the difference in moving your project forward.
Manage Stakeholder Requirements
We’ve covered a lot here on the importance of stakeholder requirements and how you can manage this process.
If you’re looking for a more efficient way to manage stakeholders and understand their needs, check out Simply Stakeholders! Practical features that can support your requirements gathering process include:
- Stakeholder register: Create and organize your list of stakeholders, along with any interactions, feedback, and comments
- Stakeholder mapping: Visualize your stakeholders based on key criteria or relationships to organize them into groups and prioritize them for engagement
- Stakeholder analysis: Qualitatively analyze stakeholder comments and feedback to understand issues, sentiments, and more
- Tracking: Track and monitor your stakeholders via dashboards and generate reports in just a few clicks
Learn more about how our platform works or reach out to the Simply Stakeholders team to book a personalized demo.
