Who Are your Stakeholders, Including Customers and End Users?
When it comes to Scrum Teams delivering value effectively, collaboration is key. This includes Scrum Team members working closely with their stakeholders. Scrum Teams that engage and collaborate closely with their Stakeholders during the Sprint can gain valuable insights early on, allowing them to inspect and adapt faster. Additionally, close collaboration between the Scrum Team and their stakeholders helps build trust, loyalty and support.
To effectively collaborate with your stakeholders, you first need to know who they are, what their needs are and what frustrates them. As a Scrum Master you can help increase effective stakeholder engagement and collaboration by bringing the team together to capture what the team collectively knows about your stakeholders. One way to do this is by creating a stakeholder map collaboratively with the team.
The outcome of a collaborative stakeholder mapping activity is a shared understanding of the stakeholders needs and interests, and removal of any barriers between stakeholders and the team that prevent close collaboration. An output of the activity can be a stakeholder map that helps guide with involving the right stakeholders at the right time. The Stakeholder map is meant to be a living artifact, and should be kept lightweight, especially in an empirical environment because it is likely to evolve and change. For example different stakeholders may need to be involved depending on the Product Goal or where the product is in its lifecycle.
The Scrum Team should understand their stakeholder relationships as early as possible. Try using a stakeholder mapping activity and regularly review it to adapt the stakeholder map as relationships change.
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