Stakeholder Analysis
Who is affected, what they need, and who can block you late.
5 to work through
-
beginner
A migration proposal cuts total three-year cost from £4.2m to £3.1m. The finance director objects to it. What mechanism makes a cheaper design worse from their seat, and what would you change about the proposal?
3 min answer -
intermediate
An architect faces conflicting requirements from sales, operations, finance and compliance. What method resolves this without deferring to seniority?
2 min answer -
intermediate
An architect faces conflicting requirements: sales wants a feature in six weeks, security requires a control that takes twelve, and the platform team wants it built on the paved road that does not yet support it. How should this be handled?
2 min answer -
intermediate
Which stakeholders in an architecture decision do architects most often overlook, and what does each care about?
2 min answer -
intermediate
You are handed a design brief for a system spanning four departments. What do you do before designing anything?
1 min answer
4 terms in this topic
Compensating Control
A cheaper measure that reduces a risk enough to proceed, used deliberately and with an expiry, when the full control cannot be delivered in the avail…
patternConfiguration Surface
A deliberately designed set of configurable behaviours that absorbs the customisation requests a business will predictably receive, so the answer bec…
practicePower-Interest Grid
A classification of stakeholders by their influence over a decision and their level of concern with it, used to allocate communication effort deliberately.
practiceStakeholder Analysis
Identifying who has a stake in a decision, what each cares about, and what would make each object — before the design review rather than during it.
Neighbouring topics
Business Architecture
General material on the business side of architecture.
Business Capabilities
What a business does, stated stably and independent of implementation.
Capability Mapping
Overlaying systems onto capabilities to expose duplication and gaps.
Business Processes
How work actually flows, including the handoffs nobody documented.
Value Streams
End-to-end delivery of an outcome, and where the waiting happens.
Domain Boundaries
Where the language of the business changes, and services should too.
Product Thinking
Treating platforms and services as products with users and a lifecycle.
Business KPIs
The numbers a design is ultimately judged against.
Regulatory Constraints
Non-negotiable requirements that remove design options entirely.
Organisational Constraints
Team structure, skills and budget cycles as architectural inputs.
Time to Market
The constraint that dominates most products, and how to trade against it.
Build vs Buy
Differentiation versus table stakes, priced over five years.
Business Cases
Expressing an architecture proposal in the currency that gets funded.
Operating Models
How delivery, platform and governance functions fit together.
Team Topologies
Stream-aligned, platform, enabling and complicated-subsystem teams.
Platform as a Product
Adoption earned rather than mandated, with an owner and a roadmap.
Outcome Measurement
Knowing whether the thing you built achieved what it promised.
Portfolio Prioritisation
Choosing between investments with incomparable benefits.
Business Continuity
What the business does while the system is unavailable.