You have all your requirements in front of you on a piece of paper. You smell the paper. You feel the paper. You sense the emotions that are attached to the requirements. You close your eyes, and you have these images, these colorful blurs, you are in touch with the minds of the stakeholders. You are the stakeholder profiler. You have to get the stakes out of the requirements.

Group all the requirements together per stakeholder. Try to formulate the stakes that are behind them. It's difficult, it's rather vague, it's very "soft", but it's the information you are after. Remember, the requirements will likely change during the course of the project, but stakes remain the same.

The requirements itself will be represented in the way you defined in the preparation of the workshop. All the participants will have their own version, and are confronted with the stuff they wished for; every requirement has a name attached to it who said it.

For project management and perhaps some key stakeholders, it may be wise to have some representation of the stakes. Such a presentation may help to refine the definition of the stakes. Taken from a professional FBI profiler, you could use some great slides with, for every stakeholder, a photo and the crimes (stakes) he or she committed.

 

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