Stakeholder identification in the life cycle
Stakeholder identification has two goals, and it depends on resourcing, representation and the system's relation to systemic and cultural bias.
What clause 5.2.2 asks
Two aims guide the search for stakeholders: find the groups that can shape the system, and find the groups the system can shape. Three conditions support those aims. The people doing the search need enough time and access. Their makeup should reflect the people named in the business requirement. And the team should ask how the system relates to patterns of bias that already exist in the setting and in the culture.
Why it matters
The clause is a resource and representation check, not a list of stakeholder categories. A team that is under-resourced will identify the easy stakeholders and stop. A team that does not represent the affected groups will miss attributes that matter. A team that ignores systemic and cultural bias will treat a disparity as a local defect when it is a pattern in the environment. The clause 1.4 note that diverse teams help is not a requirement, but this clause makes the supporting conditions part of the work.
What good looks like
Budget the identification work explicitly: time, access and facilitation. Compare the team's composition with the stakeholder set and record the differences. Where the team cannot represent a group, use the clause 4 external advocate route. Examine the system against known systemic and cultural patterns in its domain, and record what the team looked for as well as what it found.
Evidence an assessor asks for
The assessor will ask how the stakeholder set was resourced and who was in the room. A set produced in a single hour by the delivery team will not satisfy the representation goal.
- Resourcing record The time, budget and access allocated to stakeholder identification
- Representation check The team composition compared with the stakeholder set
- Advocate decision Where representation is missing, the external advocate and the steps covered
- Systemic bias note The known patterns in the domain and how the system relates to them
Where it commonly fails
- The stakeholder list is produced by the delivery team alone
- No time is budgeted for talking to affected groups
- Systemic bias is treated as outside the system boundary
What to do before publication
Resource the work before clause 6 starts. The identification is a research activity, not a brainstorm.
Read across
← 5.2.1 Requirements for bias consideration5.2.3 Data representation in the life cycle →