<aside> ⭐ While we might not think of stakeholder management as a key UX skill, it is integral to our work. When using these stakeholder-management techniques, think of your job as a servant stakeholder whose job is to create transparency, head off conflict, and maintain your own sanity as a UX-design professional. Let’s get started.
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Sitting down with your stakeholders, asking them four basic questions, then documenting their answers is your best defense against scope creep and conflicting priorities.
Sure this seems basic, but fundamentals sometimes get overlooked when you’re getting a lot of conflicting information from various stakeholders who are ostensibly part of a product team. Sitting down with your stakeholders, asking them four basic questions, then documenting their answers is your best defense against scope creep and conflicting priorities. Ask stakeholders the following questions:
There are times when work is coming at you so fast that you simply cannot produce a requirements document that fully defines scope in a timely manner and get stakeholders to quickly sign off on it. In such cases, you should consider turning feature requests into agile user stories. Alternatively, when you’re really in a crunch, write a brief email message to stakeholders making a request, restating their requests and communicating how you’ll resolve them.
More than anything else, having a well-defined scope is a great shield against take-charge stakeholders who might swoop in at the last minute and disrupt the team’s work by asking for more. Participating in scoping is also a good way for less assertive personalities to learn to push back when requests come in that are unreasonable or would be disruptive to a project. In my experience, just saying something is out of scope is like putting up a brick wall and forces all stakeholders to chill out and negotiate.
It is always good to document who is the most important stakeholder at a given point in a project and for what purpose—both so you and your team know who to report to and so you can deflect responsibility for things that are not part of your job description. I prefer the RACI method of identifying roles and responsibilities. This method is very simple and flexible and lets you group stakeholders by whether they are: