45 min.
A5.KCI-1. Determine the information needs of the stakeholders
Even before the actual start, you (in consultation with your team and other important stakeholders) make an inventory of the information needs. The starting point is the analysis of all the parties involved.
Based on what is at stake for them, you can determine what information they need. After that, you ask yourself what data you need to be able to provide this information. When there is much at stake for a stakeholder, it can be expected that he will want to be intensely involved. The amount of influence he has determines the extent to which you meet his need for this level of involvement.
In advance, you discuss the reports in question with the different parties that are involved. The influence matrix gives an insight into those matters. With the help of this matrix, you determine the sort of information someone needs.
In the example shown, M. Bush has a need for financial information and the deployment of people. On the other hand, M. Ali and J. Hoss require information about the machines that have been commissioned for use.
The reports, therefore, depend a lot on the target group you want to address. Standard templates form a good basis, but these are often insufficient to cover all the information needs, and therefore, you always have to customize the standard reports.
As well as the information needs of these parties, you also have your own need for information, and a risk analysis is an important starting point for this. You want to know how certain risks are developing. It can be that one of the risk responses requires that you monitor the efficiency of the different teams.
As a gauge of this, you measure the daily progress a team makes, and compare it with the other teams (study the graph).
Two teams have been plotted on this graph. When you look carefully, you can see that team B controls its process much better than team A. Such a graph, therefore, provides a lot more information than two tables with the data for the separate teams. A picture often says more than a thousand words, and, therefore, the graph becomes information to you, whereas the tables just contained data.
Something else you must think about is the balance between formal and informal information. The former is fixed in the rules, which the participating organizations have imposed on themselves in the form of standard reports. We often see that decision makers are informally updated beforehand. You can view the informal communication as the oil, which allows the wheels of the formal communication to run smoothly.
Application
You can convert the above into actions on the project/programme/portfolio for which you are currently responsible, by carrying out the following steps:
Assess and document the information and archiving needs.
Define the various (formal and informal) communication processes.
Explain the importance of good information exchange.
Determine the specific information needs of this project/programme/portfolio.
