stakeholder how to create the value to apple customer for organizaion benefits
Answers
First, let me define ”stakeholders.” I like Scott Ambler’s definition: ”anyone who is a direct user, indirect user, manager of users, senior manager, operations staff member, the ‘gold owner’ who funds the project, support (help desk) staff member, auditors, your program/portfolio manager, developers working on other systems that integrate or interact with the one under development, or maintenance professionals potentially affected by the development and/or deployment of a software project.”1
So why don’t your stakeholders always understand the value you deliver? Because often project leaders – even Agile project leaders – talk about their projects or processes in terms of features. It’s not their fault, stakeholders do the same. ”We need faster processes, better user interfaces, more efficient, system-supported workflows.” Yes, but what do these things mean for the stakeholder? What’s in it for them? And what does it mean for your organization as a whole?
You can communicate exactly what’s in it for your stakeholders by communicating in terms of benefits, not features. Features are what your system or process can do. Benefits are why people care.
The most straight-forward definition of each (which comes out of the marketing world) are:
Feature: a characteristic that is special or important
Benefit: an advantage that is meaningful for your stakeholder
Frederieke Ubels, Scrum Process Coach at bol.com in the Netherlands, commented to me that she thinks of benefits as more universal: “Everybody wants to feel happy and safe, make money, have happy customers, etc. Features help to achieve benefits, but only if and when they are used – not so universal, more of the conditional kind,” she says. “Features can be used, but they can also not be used. It is up to you if you value them or not.”
Sell with the benefit; support with the feature
Marketers have been selling us the benefits since the beginning of time. I don’t really want the wheel, I want something that is easier to roll – or even better, makes transport easier so I save time and energy. I don’t want a new car, I want something that gets me from A to B quickly so I save time, is safe and looks cool so that I feel good driving it.
The same goes for projects. I don’t want to be able to search a certain way in a database. I want to get the information I need, when I need it, to save time and frustration. I don’t want to analyze customer needs. I want to satisfy customers, so they keep buying from us and my company makes more money.
Saving time. Feeling secure. Experiencing little or no frustration. Earning more money. These are the real benefits. These are the things that create business value. It is important that we know how to “sell” (or, as I’d rather say, “communicate”) the benefits to stakeholders.
It’s the benefits that connect with our emotions that create a desire for something. The relatively new field of neuromarketing explores how these connections work. Basically, when we create a tangible connection to something – especially something that connects to an emotion, or one that we can see, touch, hear, smell or taste, a memory is made that is embedded deep in the brain. It is also in this part of the brain where decisions are made. So, if you can find a way to connect on an emotional level with your stakeholder, you are much closer to creating understanding, having them on “your side” when you are looking for more resources or support, and working to reach your own value-adding goals.
But communicating the benefits is not enough. You also need to talk to the “logical” part of people’s brains that want the facts, the data, the research behind things. These are your features. They are all the capabilities that enable you to deliver the benefit – the business value to your stakeholder.
Start by talking about the value you deliver and support your messages with features. As you get better at this, you can steal from marketing experts who tell stories that fit the stakeholder’s world. A story that clearly shows you understand what’s in their heart and mind.
For example, one such story (slightly exaggerated) might be:
“In a time only a few iterations away…our CRM clients will be able to turn on their PCs, and immediately search and find the customer information they need in any form. It could be a shipping address, their very first purchase order, a list of most-often purchased items. They can cross-reference against other orders, including other customers in the same company and with outside companies and see trends. They will become smarter, more relied-upon CRM representatives and their customers will be ecstatic. Our CRM clients will become rich and fulfilled and, in turn, so will we. Together, we will all live happily ever after.”