Professional Business Analysts / Finding out

The stakeholder who is not in the room

The people affected are rarely the people consulted.

Consultation follows organisational lines, which means it reaches the people who have time to attend meetings and represent a function. The people who will actually use the thing every day are frequently reached second hand, through a manager describing their needs, and a manager's account of frontline work is a summary produced at a distance and shaped by what they are accountable for.

The absence is often structural rather than deliberate. Frontline staff are scheduled, and releasing them costs the operation something visible, while the cost of not consulting them is invisible until much later. So the project consults who is available, and the requirements reflect who was available.

The correction is not to invite everybody, which produces meetings that decide nothing. It is to identify, explicitly and in writing, which groups will be affected and which of those have been heard from directly rather than by proxy. Making the gap visible on a single page is usually enough to get it addressed, because nobody wants to be recorded as having decided not to ask.

The other absent parties are downstream: the team who will support the thing, the people who will report on it, and whoever inherits it in three years. Each has requirements that nobody in the room is motivated to raise.

The absent stakeholder problem has a variant that is harder to see, which is the group represented by somebody who genuinely believes they speak for it. A team leader describing their team's needs is offering a real account, filtered through what they are accountable for and what their team tells them, and both filters are systematic. The check is not to doubt them but to test one specific claim directly with somebody doing the work, which usually confirms most of it and corrects something important.