Requirements and Stakeholder Management VH4003

Assignment Report

Academic Term: 5

Requirements and Stakeholder Management

Course Code: VH4003

Lecturer/Tutor Name: Sarah Qureshi

Section 1) Assignment Task and Guidance

Introduction

Stakeholder management is an essential skill for project managers and their teams. Failing to identify individual or groups of stakeholders or communicating with them in a way that does engage and involve them with the project at the right level can be at best counter-productive and at worst cause the project to fail. Engagement with stakeholders such as customers and users often concern determining the requirements for the project, this process must also be carefully managed.

Report

Project requirements and engaging with stakeholders are 2 essential skills for any project manager. This assignment involves the utilization and contextualization current knowledge and thinking in managing project requirements, and the engagement and communication with project stakeholders in the most appropriate manner, which will depend upon their importance to the project. Part 1 asks you to carry out identification, analysis and plan for engaging with stakeholders for one of your projects. In Part 2 you need to investigate project requirements management processes in your organization. Part 3 involves you producing a reflective piece of writing to capture learning and future development as a result of taking this module on requirements management and stakeholder engagement.

Using these inquires, you reflect on how you can use them to develop your Intellectual / Professional Skills & Abilities and Personal Value Attributes

Produce a 3000-word overarching narrative report (Word document) that identifies and evaluates the impact of requirements and stakeholder management on projects. You may consider impact at any level of analysis, from individual and project level to organizational context for the variety of approaches that can be adopted. The report must demonstrate the valid use of concepts learned from the course and include insights about how your organisation manages projects and how you can help improve that management directly and by developing yourself.

This part of the assessment also requires in-depth demonstration of the application of your learning on the development of your programme portfolio, documenting the processes and systems used in your organization to manage quality and control change.

Appropriate academic sources (Journals, Conference Papers, Books, etc.) should be used throughout (and Harvard referenced) to provide evidence of an in-depth understanding of the area and justification for the decisions taken. Seek to search for ideas and concepts that help you make your assessment highly specific to your organisation. Where necessary, use appendices for supporting evidence

Introduction

It is important to identify the role of different stakeholders in relation to the project as well as their individual objectives to establish the most appropriate means of engagement with them. This will help to create and maintain a positive relation to be able to promote positive working environment and morale for the project. The project manager needs to analyse the interests of the stakeholder and the potential impact of those interests on the projects viability to ensure highest possible satisfaction amongst the stakeholders. This is done by assessing their level of power against their interest in the project using the power/interest matrix grid. This allows the project manager to decide how they should engage with the stakeholder. This enables a smooth operation and delivery of the project by keeping the correct stakeholders updated with the relevant information, so they are aware, kept satisfied and dont inadvertently create a hurdle for the project

Part - 1 (work-based) Project Stakeholder Management

Carry out a comprehensive stakeholder identification, analysis/assessment and planning for a project that you are involved or familiar with.

You will need to include the following elements:

Identify and record project stakeholders using a variety of techniques and tools.

Analyse and assess the relative importance of stakeholder groups and individuals using accepted techniques.

Produce a plan showing how the project manager/team should engage/communicate with different groups of stakeholders and key individuals.

[30 marks]

Project to refer to also included in Appendix A:

Techniques to be used: Stakeholder Mapping Technique and Power/Interest Tool

Some of the key stakeholders:

Project Manager, Assistant Project Manager (this is my role), PBMO Team ( contracts team and admin delivery team), Suppliers, Programme Manager, Client PM, contractors, designers, implementation manager (they conduct surveys and primarily liaise with suppliers' day to day)

Part - 2 (work-based) Project Requirements Management Process

Investigate the project requirements management processes in your organization. Based on your findings and knowledge from the module, specify a requirements management process.

Consider the following in your report:

Explain how requirements are captured and recorded, including the level and detail of information that is gathered. What are the methods, tools and techniques that are used to gather these requirements?

Analyse how the requirements are organized, categorized, and assessed. Subsequently, how are requirements evaluated and prioritised is there a systematic process? Are any requirements eliminated or held over for follow-up project or later releases?

How is the requirement baselined, and who approves that baseline? What are the consequences for the project and how the requirements are managed?

[30 marks]

Gather requirements This stage seeks to collect requirements from the various project stakeholders. The PM and team need to ensure that all possible requirements for the project are gathered and documented in a standard way. Making sure that all stakeholders have been identified and consulted is important; this can be challenging as they may not always be immediately available for these discussions or may not be fully aware of all their requirements.

Analyse requirements This stage seeks to analyse the requirements once all of these are gathered and documented, using specific value-based techniques such as function analysis and function cost-analysis to fully understand the requirements and the value they will contribute to the overall objectives of the project. The PM and team may choose to group similar requirements or even use a labelling system to sort the gathered requirements. This step typically also involves testing any assumptions made. During the analysis, any gaps should be identified, or conflicting requirements resolved; and functionality and value of alternative ideas should be assessed. It is important to communicate any findings back to the source stakeholders and to build consensus. It is also important to achieve a baselined set of options for functional requirements.

Justify requirements This stage seeks to prioritise the functional requirement set. With a large set of functional requirements documented for the project, there is now a need to link the requirements to the benefits and project success criteria. This will help the team differentiate the needs from the wants for the project. Techniques such as the MoSCoW (M Must have; S Should have; C Could have; W Wont have) approach can be used to prioritise the functional requirement set. Again, feedback to the source stakeholders is advisable to mitigate any disputes later in the project lifecycle at completion or during transition,

Baseline requirements Once the functional requirement set is prioritised and agreed, it will then form the baseline for the project. It is from this baseline that the PM and the team can now work to determine the principal project deliverables. Some examples of why it is important to baseline the functional requirements, are firstly so that progress can be measured against this fixed set and, so that the PM and team can easily identify when there is a change to these which ultimately will help to mitigate scope creep.

Part - 3 (work-based) Individual Reflection

Individual reflection on the development of your stakeholder management & engagement, and requirements management skills and knowledge.

Produce a piece of reflective writing that looks at what you have learnt and how you have developed your skills and thinking during this module.

You should consider the following in your reflective report:

Use a suitable reflective model/concept to give structure to your reflection.

How have you changed your behaviour and attitude to managing stakeholders or requirements in your project(s)?

How will this learning affect your future approach to managing project requirements and engaging effectively with stakeholders who have any influence or interest in your project?

Use the Gibbs Reflective Model for this reflection. Some points to help : I started off in the PBMO contracts team where I mainly liaised with the contracts lead and the project manager as well as commercial reviewers to complete all admin tasks of getting the contracts signed and all the relevant documents checked and approved as well as ensuring the project received the correct approval with the correct and approved supporting documents. I mainly only interacted with internal stakeholders. Then I moved to delivery PBMO team where I still mainly liaised with internal but had started to have some exposure to contact with external and wider stakeholders. Iwould send change request documents to the client as well as milestone invoices. I also got exposure to contact with suppliers as I would do the admin of supplier invoices. I then moved onto become an assistant project manager where I was in meetings with the client and suppliers and have started to have more interactions with them. I am involved in more conversations regarding the project scope, requirements and discussions around those.

References

A full list of references used within the report should be provided. The Harvard Style of referencing should be applied throughout the assignment.

This section is not used when determining the word count of this report.

Appendices

Appendix A