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Using Web 2.0 for Stakeholder Analysis: StakeSource and Its Application in Ten Industrial Projects

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Managing Requirements Knowledge

Abstract

Software projects often fail because stakeholders are omitted. Existing stakeholder analysis methods rely on practitioners to manually identify and prioritise stakeholders, which is time consuming, especially in large projects with many stakeholders. This chapter investigates the use of Web 2.0 technologies, such as crowdsourcing and social networking, to identify and prioritise stakeholders. The investigation is based on the application of StakeSource in practice. StakeSource is a Web 2.0 tool that uses social networking and crowdsourcing techniques to identify and prioritise stakeholders. This chapter describes our experiences of and lessons learnt from applying StakeSource in ten real-world projects from six organisations in UK, Japan, Australia, and Canada, involving more than 600 stakeholders. We find that StakeSource can yield significant benefits, but its effectiveness depends on the stakeholders’ incentives to share information. In some projects, StakeSource elicited valuable stakeholder information; in other projects, the stakeholder responses were insufficient to add value. We conclude with a description of factors that influence stakeholder engagement via the use of Web 2.0 tools such as StakeSource. If collaborative tools such as StakeSource were to find a place in requirements engineering, we would need to understand what motivates stakeholders to contribute.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In this chapter, practitioners refer to the requirements engineers, project managers, system analysts, business analysts or developers who are responsible for stakeholder analysis in their projects.

  2. 2.

    http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newPPM_07.htm.

  3. 3.

    http://www.stakeholder-management.com/.

  4. 4.

    StakeSource tool demo is available at http://vimeo.com/18250588. For further details about StakeSource, refer to the previous work [9, 11].

  5. 5.

    In Deutskens et al.’s study of the response rate of online surveys with different configurations (e.g., short vs. long, donation to charity vs. lottery incentive, early vs. late reminder), they found that the response rate ranged from 9.4 % to 31.4 %.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the SEGAL and CHISEL research groups at University of Victoria, Peggy Storey, and Peter Bentley for their feedback on the work and the practitioners and stakeholders for their feedback on StakeSource.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University College London, London, UK

    S. L. Lim & A. Finkelstein

  2. University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada

    D. Damian

  3. National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, Japan

    F. Ishikawa

Authors
  1. S. L. Lim
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  2. D. Damian
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  3. F. Ishikawa
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  4. A. Finkelstein
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to S. L. Lim .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Informatics / MOBIS, University of Hamburg, Vogt-Kölln-Str. 30, Hamburg, 22527, Germany

    Walid Maalej

  2. Harman Becker Automotive Systems GmbH, Moosacher Str. 48, Munich, 80809, Germany

    Anil Kumar Thurimella

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Lim, S.L., Damian, D., Ishikawa, F., Finkelstein, A. (2013). Using Web 2.0 for Stakeholder Analysis: StakeSource and Its Application in Ten Industrial Projects. In: Maalej, W., Thurimella, A. (eds) Managing Requirements Knowledge. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34419-0_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34419-0_10

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