Agile by Design

Chapter 10Facilitating Your Story Workshop

If you've got a brand new analytic project you're working on that's new for the business, identifying stakeholders across the organization helps the team get their bearings on which resources will be critical to the project. Understanding the stakeholders' impression of the project and their level of influence helps you get in front of people who may negatively impact the project (or positively help it!). Once you've identified the resources that can provide valuable input, prepare for your story workshop (see Figure 10.1). Use brainstorming techniques to run your meeting, capture and organize their ideas, and always follow up with your participants.

Figure 10.1 Story Workshop Considerations

Stakeholder Analysis

Analytic projects, especially the ones that will likely have a large business impact, have business stakeholders. It's critical to identify the right people upfront and engage them through the project. These are the people who are closest to the business—their experience and intuition provide important inputs to overall context of the project. Their guidance on what's appropriate in a business context is also crucial: They can give analysts a much-needed reality check for the business validity of the statistical output. Another reason for engaging with them throughout the process is that these are the teams that will be ...