Requirements come from people. Leaving some of them out produces a system that misses them. Stakeholder analysis ensures all relevant sources are known before elicitation starts.
Identify
Stakeholders include not only the client and future users but also operations and support, data protection and information security, internal audit, interface partners, suppliers, indirectly affected business units and, for public projects, often citizens or supervisory bodies. It helps to ask along processes, systems and documents: who supplies data, who uses results, who must approve something?
Assess
For each stakeholder, assess influence, interest and attitude towards the project. The power-interest grid sorts them into four fields: manage closely with high power and high interest, keep satisfied with high power and low interest, keep informed with low power and high interest, monitor when both are low. This determines who sits in workshops, who reviews drafts and who is kept informed.
In requirements engineering
Following IREB, stakeholder analysis is the starting point of elicitation. For each relevant group the elicitation technique is chosen, such as interview, workshop, observation or document analysis. Conflicts between stakeholders surface early and can be resolved deliberately rather than erupting at acceptance.
Typical mistakes
Asking only the loudest. Forgetting operations, which will maintain the system. Bringing in data protection just before go-live. And creating the list once and never updating it as responsibilities change. Systematic elicitation is described in our requirements analysis offer.