Stakeholder Engagement Workshop

Stakeholder engagement is the foundation of good architecture. In the real-world, stakeholder engagement is usually discussed as stakeholder management. All too often it is delivered as stakeholder manipulation, where the preferences of the sponsor or the EA team are sold. This course is designed to provide students with the skills and knowledge to perform real stakeholder management – weighing organization and stakeholder preference, internal and external constraints to obtain agreement to an architecture that addresses the set of stakeholder requirements. Real stakeholder management is effective stakeholder engagement.

Conexiam’s team will lead the workshop determining the stakeholders, stakeholder requirements and surrounding business motivation and context on a current project. Conexiam will require access to the architecture initiative and supporting documentation to prepare for the workshop.

In order to effectively engage with stakeholders the architect must understand:

• Set of stakeholder & organizational preferences
• Sources of stakeholder preferences
• Major forces external to & internal to an organization
• Impact of major forces

In this workshop, you will learn a set of techniques and skills to perform effective stakeholder management. Many of the central skills are classic soft skills – listening, communicating, assessing and analyzing. Tools include:

• Stakeholder map
• Business Motivation model
• Alignment model
• Effective communication

Workshop will be configured for your organization

• 1 day – in-classroom workshop

Case study with exercises that lead to a set of decision making guidance that

• Enable stakeholders to make better informed choice
• Enable project team to understand what must and must-not be done

In a case study participants will build an scenario based upon a set of unfair organizational challenges and constraints.

• Instruction by a practicing architect with emphasis on a case study
• Electronic copy of all courseware and exercise materials
• Electronic copy of all Navigate™ templates and public architecture tools used in the course
• References to relevant literature Φ

Φ Conexiam maintains a library of relevant literature used in internal development of our staff and consulting practice. The bulk of this library is from the Centre for Information Systems Research, MIT Sloane and the Harvard Business Review. Before this class the assigned instructor will review our library and select an appropriate literature. Where the literature is not publicly available Conexiam will acquire a licensed electronic copy for each student.

For this workshop to be most successful the participants must be open to understanding that the stakeholders, requirements, motivations and context that are understood prior to the workshop may be without solid foundation.

This course must be configured for your organization. All Conexiam courses have point where the course can be readily configured and are based upon Navigate.
Configuration involved adjusting the existing structure to best reflect your goals and situations. Completely custom training is also available.

Configuration provides alignment between an organization’s existing architecture deliverables, EA & governance processes, and its organizational model.
Configuration requires:

• Provision of sample deliverables your organization uses
• Provision of relevant EA artifacts (goals, objectives, process models, organization details, pain-points, etc…)
• Conference call with appropriate members of Conexiam’s team
• Material review between workshop lead and customer