Stakeholder Wars – how to effectively manage the product backlog when stakeholders priorities are not alligned.

Stakeholder Wars – how to effectively manage the product backlog when stakeholders priorities are not alligned.

Stakeholder wars is based on a real-life case impacting product backlog management. The same product – a CRM solution – was managed by two opposing groups of stakeholders. One of them represented the commercial side of the enterprise, so basically they were interested in increasing the revenue or limiting company spendings. The other one was representing the Medical Compliance, so their major concern was company’s reputation and compliance with legal obligations and medication proper description and usage.

These groups had a huge challenge in agreeing which backlog items should be analysed and implemented first due to the above described huge difference in objectives.

This is where I proposed the objective approach based on weights. Basically commercial items received a priority based on the revenue or cash saved e.g more than 500k – 5, between 250k – 499k – 4 etc. Medical compliance was measured with the impact that the change had on reducing reputational risk, increasing company adherence to legal rules or impact on physicians or patients ,e.g Compliance risk or global regulatory requirement – 5,
Improving medical safety – 4,  etc.

This ended the war and started an objective collaboration, but not only that. Find out more during the session 🙂