Make Stakeholder an accountability#33

We have the PO, SM and Developers. It is best to add Stakehokder as accountability to emphasize the importance of their input/collaboration

Stakeholders are highly situational. Could you make it concrete how you’d envision it?

Stakeholders are mentioned many times in the SG. Including what is expected from them. This is described well enough for me. Still, many teams have issues to engage with the stakeholders. Making it an official accountability should help.

The same goes for business leaders, owners or executives.

@Brett these are all stakeholders in the SG. Scrum can’t be more specific because all organisations are unique in their specific functions.

This is hard … If stakeholders is added as accountabiilty, it could lead to stakeholders political power driven development … In many cases, the customer is not necessarily the stakeholders but the customer’s opinion in some contexts is more important than stakeholder’s opinion. Should we add customer as an accountability too?

The SG has the term stakeholders for all of those @Joshua Partogi. If they all can be described as stakeholder with their respective responsibilities, why not make it formal?

Hi Willem.

Making stakeholders accountable 🤔

Perhaps a good idea on paper but not in practice.

Trying to identify who the stakeholders are would make the process tough. Holding them accountable… maybe even tougher.

Of course IMHO

Just because it is tough you should ignore it? What do you propose instead?

This is a very interesting idea. I get the explanation provided on Medium.

One question. What problem will it solve? Is it to put an emphasis on the importance of stakeholders? Can it be done without calling it an accountability?

In my opinion, there might be some issues.

It’s difficult to expect that all stakeholders will inspect the Increment every Sprint. For example, some internal stakeholders have a low interest, and a high power. You only need to keep them informed and satisfied. We shouldn’t make them accountable, they would simply ignore it. And that’s OK.

Another issue is that it’s quite common that most stakeholders are not present during the Sprint Review and in many products most customers, which are also stakeholders, “inspect” the Increment after a release. Let’s take a YouTube as an example. Am I, as a stakeholder, accountable for anything?

Defining “Key Stakeholders” as an accountability may be some solution, but it will probably make this setup even more complex.

I feel that it is a PO’s accountability to identify and engage selected stakeholders, when needed.