Leverage the practice of persona research to better understand internal stakeholders
Imagine being able to remove all the guesswork from meeting key stakeholder requirements. Or no longer relying on trial and error to determine what works and what doesn’t when it comes to involving your internal teams and partners in important company initiatives.
We remove speculation from planning and development and replaces it with objective, predictive reasoning by leveraging persona development and research.
These personas function as a generalized representation of your company’s various stakeholders, assisting you with project planning and development from their point of view. A persona illustrates the thoughts, feelings and behaviors of stakeholders, which you can then use to alter your product or service development trajectory to anticipate their demands.
We believe that stakeholder persona research can be one of the most transformative exercises for your company, offering a very favorable return on investment.
Our approach to persona research
Our teams will guide you in executing the steps to achieve successful persona development:
Step 1: Our consultants will interview your leadership and hold workshops with your teams to collect and analyze information on your stakeholders. During this step, we will draft our initial hypotheses.
Step 2: At this point, we test and confirm our hypotheses via continued research. During this stage, stakeholder personas begin to take shape.
Step 3: Here, our consultants will collaborate with your teams and build conceptual model of the stakeholders represented. We will finalize persona bios for each stakeholder pertinent to your chosen business scenarios.
Step 4: In this step, our consultants will moderate discussions around the persona bios: to understand their goals, behaviors, pressure points, needs, etc. This session does not end until our moderators are convinced your team has developed an elevated understanding of each stakeholder represented.
Step 5: Lastly, we create action plans from the insights acquired through the steps above. These plans must be prioritized according to your most important business objectives with respect toward your limited resources.
Once we have worked with you to finalize your stakeholder personas, you will have a framework and point of reference that you can use to guide future business developments.
The benefits we deliver include:
Unified work culture – The great thing about stakeholder personas is how easy they are to distribute. A persona is usually formatted as an infographic, offering a simple information delivery system that will be easily understood by all employees.
By distributing these personas internally, you can maintain a collective interdepartmental understanding of key stakeholder requirements. This will ensure that all staff members are on the same page, working towards a common goal that meets stakeholder demands.
A reduction in project risk – When a team creates a project outline without considering stakeholder requirements, it is highly likely that the project will fall short of expectations during development. This poses a risk to the business, making it challenging to create a good business case for new projects.
By utilizing stakeholder personas at the planning phase, you significantly reduce the risk of poorly executing a project. You will be able to set clearly defined objectives for projects based around stakeholder requirements, allowing you to put forward a business case confidently. The insight you gain from these personas will allow you to actively work towards remediating problems and concerns, focusing development efforts and maximizing your project's return on investment (ROI).
Stakeholder relationships – Naturally, any effort made to better understand your stakeholders will be mirrored by their appreciation, enthusiasm and ability to continue working with you. With our clients, we conduct follow-up studies to assess the results of our stakeholder persona exercises. We interview parties from both sides: internal and external stakeholders. The improvements in stakeholder-company relationships are manifold and can be measured with actual data.
Why Trianz?
Our team can help you develop informative stakeholder personas for use across your business. By understanding the needs of your stakeholders, you can create solutions that meet their demands, improving your service value and fueling business growth.
Book a consultation with us today!
