Before beginning this assignment, read the lecture, and the materials identified in the required resources section. For the final interactive assignment in this course, you will prepare a short presentation for two separate stakeholder audiences to whom you will need to communicate your proposed solution to CWI’s business problem.
Narrate a short presentation (one to three slides), and explain the changes and differences to the two audiences. Provide the information each audience needs and/or expects. Identify the stakeholder audience you are addressing. Then, post two separate audio files of no more than two minutes long—one for each audience—which delivers a synopsis of your proposed solution tailored for that stakeholder audience. Post the slides that you will use when you present to each audience.
Guided Response: Review several of your peers’ short audio narrated presentations. You will take on the stakeholder roles your peers have chosen to address in each audio narrated presentation. Evaluate the material your peers are presenting as if you are a member of that stakeholder audience. You will be evaluated on the interaction with your peers and the depth of the feedback you provide to your peers.
Provide constructive feedback to at least two of your peers on the following five areas for each of your peers’ stakeholder presentations:
The accuracy of the business problem.
The logic and clarity of the presentation viewed from the role of the specified stakeholder.
The appropriateness of the information for the audience about the proposed solution.
The appropriate level of detail about other stakeholder areas related to the target audience.
The clarity and appropriateness of the diagrams/visualizations for the audience.
lecture
Putting It All Together: Proposing the Solution
Picking up the thread from week 3, recall that we talked about knowing the audience and delivering the right information to the appropriate people in an effective format. In this final lecture we’ll look at some of the specifics about the importance of presenting information in the appropriate format for the audience. As your work on your final project for the course, consider the presentation that you’ll be delivering to CWI’s senior management. What do you know about the information needs of senior management? What are they expecting to get out of your presentation and how will you deliver it?
There are any number of forms, templates, anad methods for communicating the requirements throughout the process. As an example, the authors of your Robertson and Robertson (2013) text have their own Volere© template they use to gather and disseminate information as they work through the BSA process. While the BABOK® guide doesn’t specify a form for use, it does mention that communication documentation should be formalized, thorough, clear, and appropriate to the audience. Whatever method you chose to use it should go without saying that it should be clear, concise, accurate, and be a document you are proud of when it’s done.
This final week will take you through another important aspect of the communication process, which is that of verbally delivering your message. Not only do you need to be clear, accurate, and concise in your delivery, but you also need to know what your audience is looking for and expects from you. This is essential to an effective communication session with your stakeholders. You need to consider who you’re talking to, and what they need to know.
As you’ve seen throughout this course, the stakeholders come from all levels of the organization, and have widely varying degrees of understanding about the business problem and the surrounding issues. From subject matter experts, to line managers, to end users, and to the executive level, understanding the information needs of the stakeholders requires in depth knowledge of the business and the roles that each stakeholder type plays. In depth knowledge is essential to being able to provide the appropriate level of detail to each of your audiences.
Let’s take a simple example of the differences in the information various stakeholder groups at CWI might need on the development of a business solution. Consider the differences in information needs between these three stakeholder groups: programmers, middle managers, and customer service reps.
Programmers would likely be interested in the details of the modules they are responsible for delivering on for the projects they’re involved with. This kind of information might be the number of enhancements outstanding, what the detailed testing results are on the completed modules, number and type of bugs found in the new code, and what the targets are for the next Agile sprint session.
Middle managers would likely be interested in the progress on the latest enhancement requests and how close the programmers are to meeting the delivery date of the final iteration of the software. They would likely not be interested in the individual targets for the next Agile sprint session or the bugs found in the latest code written.
Customer service and collection reps are likely only interested in when the software will be rolled out and what the impact is going to be on them and their daily work processes.
As you might imagine, each of these audiences have very different information needs, and it will vary in detail and in complexity. In some cases the data delivered may be the same, but the format of the charts or graphs might vary, or perhaps the depth of detail included may be different. It’s essential that you know what your audience needs in order to deliver the desired information in the most efficient format to the various groups. And, to do that you need to know who the audience is and understand their information needs.
Asking them directly can be a good way to get an idea of the kinds of information they want, or asking other more experienced people about the appropriate information for a particular group of stakeholders. Another way is to examine communications put out by the stakeholders themselves as this can give you insight into how they may expect to receive information.
A key element of your role as a BSA is to be able to deliver and address the information that your stakeholders need. The final project of this course will give you the opportunity to deliver a video presentation to CWI’s senior management, which will be supplemented with a proposal summary paper. The summary paper will provide additional details on the methodologies that you explored over the course of this class. This concludes the last lecture for this course. Be sure to review the materials included in the class for this week’s tasks.
Congratulations on being in the final week of INF630 – have a great week!
Reference
Robertson, S. & Robertson, J. (2013). Mastering the Requirements Process: Getting Requirements Right, 3rd ed. Addison-Wesley. Upper Saddle River, NJ
