Stakeholder Needs Definition
Lead Author: Tami Katz, Contributing Authors: Lou Wheatcraft, Mike Ryan
The second activity performed in concept definition, after Business or Mission Analysis, is called Stakeholder Needs Definition, which explores what capabilities are needed by various stakeholders for the system-of-interest (SoI) to accomplish the mission.
Note that the Business or Mission Analysis process is often performed iteratively with Stakeholder Needs Definition to better understand the problem (or opportunity) space, as well as options of solution space.
The outcome of the Stakeholder Needs Definition process is used as the basis of system validation, as well as input into the System Requirements definition process.
Purpose and Definition
The initial effort of SoI development is to establish the problem space, which is used as inputs into the design process. As shown in Figure 1, prior to the establishment of requirements there is an activity to gather Needs. These needs are assessed from multiple analysis activities, resulting in an Integrated Set of Needs that includes stakeholder needs, risks, drivers, constraints, and the results from life cycle concepts analysis and maturation effort.
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Figure 1. Establishment of an Integrated Set of Needs ensures that all perspectives are analyzed during the Stakeholder Need Definition process, including risks, drivers, constraints, and life cycle concepts analysis and maturation. Figure from INCOSE Needs and Requirements Manual v1.1, Figure 1-2.
The establishment of needs forms the basis of a full understanding of the capabilities expected of the SoI, and these needs are ultimately transformed into a set of design-input requirements on the SoI as part of the System Requirements definition process.
Principles and Concepts
The results of the Business and Mission Analysis [link to page] is provided to the project team to complete the rest of the process of SoI concept definition using the Stakeholder Needs Definition process (shown in Figure 2). This includes the problem, threat or opportunity statement capturing why the project is worth doing, the mission, goals and objectives (MGOs) used as the criteria for project success, along with identification of major stakeholders, initial life cycle concepts, and identification of initial concepts of the solution space.
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Figure 2. Stakeholder Needs Definition expands upon the Business or Mission Analysis results to refine the set of needs for the SoI. Original SEBoK figure.
The Stakeholder Needs Definition process continues the concept definition effort to ensure the system-of-interest (SoI) will provide the capabilities needed by users and other stakeholders in a defined environment. This process is much more than identification and elicitation of need statements from various stakeholders, it consists of a series of analysis steps done to ensure that all parameters are captured, including risks, drivers, constraints, as well as the SoI life cycle concepts analysis and maturation (shown in Figure 2); this effort results in an Integrated Set of Needs. [glossary term addition].
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Figure 3. Establishment of an Integrated Set of Needs ensures that all perspectives are analyzed during the Stakeholder Need Definition process, including risks, drivers, constraints, and life cycle concepts analysis and maturation. Figure from INCOSE Needs and Requirements Manual v1.1, Figure 4-5.
The result of this process is a comprehensive set of needs representing all stakeholders and life cycle concepts, which are used as the basis of generating design-input requirements for the SoI.
Nomenclature discussion
This process is frequently referred to as the "Stakeholder Needs and Requirements" process. Because various guides, textbooks, and standards refer to stakeholder “expectations, needs, and requirements” as if they are the same, resulting in confusion as to what is an “expectation” versus a “need” and a “requirement”, this article focuses on the process of developing a full set of stakeholder needs. The term "stakeholder requirement" is considered a set of requirements on the SoI established by the stakeholder, as transformed from their needs, which is provided as additional input towards the generation of the Integrated Set of Needs. In Figure 3, this is part of the Higher-Level Requirements input, consisting of the stakeholder-owned set of requirements on the SoI.
Process Approach
Inputs to the Stakeholder Needs Definition Process
The inputs from the Business or Mission Analysis process includes: Identification of major stakeholders, definition of the problem, threat or opportunity space, eaboration of the mission, goals, objectives (MGOs) and measures defining project success, capture of preliminary life cycle concepts, and identification of initial concepts of the solution space, including alternatives.
Activities of the Process
Major activities and tasks performed during this process include the following:
- Identify additional stakeholders or classes of stakeholders across the life cycle
- Elicit, capture, consolidate and prioritize stakeholder needs and expectations
- Identify drivers and constraints on the SoI and its development efforts
- Identify potential risks (or threats and hazards) that could be generated by the stakeholder requirements (for further information, see Risk Management)
- Mature and analyze the life cycle concepts
- Identify, baseline, and manage the Integrated Set of Needs
The activities behind each of these are described in the following sections. Additional resources for performing these activities are captured in the INCOSE Needs and Requirements Manual (shown in the References section).
Identify Stakeholders
Stakeholders are the primary source of needs and requirements, therefore for the project to be successful, all relevant stakeholders must be identified and included at the beginning of the project. Leaving out a relevant stakeholder often results in missing needs and requirements and a failure to pass system validation. Stakeholders can include, but are not limited to customers, sponsors, organization decision makers, regulatory organizations, developing organizations, integrators, testers, users, operators, maintainers, support organizations, the public at large (within the context of the business and proposed solution), and those involved in the disposal or retirement of the SOI. Stakeholders can be both internal and external to the organization. There can be many stakeholders for a SoI over its life cycle; therefore, considering the life cycle concepts across the life cycle provides a thorough source for stakeholder identification. Examples of stakeholders are provided in Table 1.
| Life Cycle Stage | Example of Related Stakeholders |
|---|---|
| Engineering | Paying customer, sponsor, project team, project manager, procurement, research and development, suppliers, regulating authorities, public, marketing, end users, operators, compliance office, regulators, owners of enabling systems, owners of external systems, Approving Authorities |
| Development | Acquirer, subject matter experts (SMEs), system architects, design engineers, suppliers, procurement, suppliers (technical domains for components realization), integration team |
| Production, Integration, Verification and Validation | Production organization, process engineers, quality control, production verification, product acceptance, supply chain, test engineers, system integration engineers, system verification engineers, system validation engineers, operators/users, owners of enabling systems, facility personnel, contracting, Approving Authorities, regulators, safety personnel, security personnel |
| Logistics and Maintenance | Customer/technical support, replacement part providers, service technicians, trainers, IT, quality engineer, inspectors, those conducting post development system verification and system validation activities |
| Operation | Normal users, unexpected users, etc. |
| Disposal | Operators, waste management, regulators, public |
Often there will be multiple members of a stakeholder group, e.g., users, operators, marketing, sales, safety, regulators, customers, the “public” who will be buying, using, operating, or maintaining a product or may be affected by the product in some way. It may not be practical to collaborate with every member of the group to elicit their needs, identification of a person to represent that group will provide a way to ensure that perspective is addressed. A key part of stakeholder identification is to determine who the Approving Authorities are within the group of stakeholders. It cannot be assumed that the only stakeholder that has this authority is the “customer. The Approving Authorities include stakeholder(s) that are responsible for formally certifying, qualifying, and approving the system for use in its operational environment by its intended users.
An approach for recording the list of stakeholders is to use a stakeholder register that includes key information for each stakeholder involved in some way with the SoI. In a data-centric approach, the register can be included in the MBSE system model, where the stakeholders are identified along with their viewpoints and connection to the life cycle stage.
It is recommended that the project team re-evaluate the stakeholder community periodically to ensure successful engagement with stakeholders, keeping them engaged, and managing changes in stakeholders and their needs.
Stakeholder Needs Elicitation
For stakeholder needs elicitation, the project team engages the stakeholders to understand their needs and technical requirements not only just during operations but for all life cycle stages. The elicitation activities allow the project team to discover and understand what is needed, what processes exist, how stakeholders interact with the SoI, what happens over the SoI’s life cycle from their perspective (examples are provided below). It is recommended that several techniques or methods be considered during elicitation activities to better accommodate the diverse set of sources, including:
- Structured brainstorming workshops
- Interviews and questionnaires
- Workshops or Focus groups
- Use of visual and descriptive content associated with the SoI
- Technical, operational, and/or strategy documentation review
- Feedback from verification and validation processes
Topics to discuss with the stakeholders include:
- Feedback on the outputs from the Business and Mission Analysis process (problem/threat/opportunity, MGOs, etc.)
- Identify the life cycle stages the stakeholder represents
- For each life cycle stage, obtain input on expected and off-nominal use cases or scenarios
- Identify desired capabilities and functions from their perspective
- Identify interactions with external systems
- Obtain input on their view of quality and other "ilities", such as reliability, testability, serviceability, etc.
- Inquire about their view of risks and hazards, along with likelihood and consquence
- For each need, capture rationale concerning "why"
- Ask about criticality of the stated needs, and relative priorities of all inputs obtained
During elicitation activities, it is important to ask the stakeholders to prioritize what they are asking for. Some things will be especially important to the stakeholder, while other things may be “nice-to-haves” or “desires”, but not critical to the system being able to achieve the agreed to mission, goals, and objectives. There will be some things that the stakeholder may be able to “live without” given budget or schedule constraints.
Not all stakeholders are equal. Based on their position and role, some stakeholders have more “power” and influence than others (for example, customers and the Approving Authorities). In this case, higher ranked stakeholder’s needs and stakeholder-owned requirements will have more importance (higher priority) than lower ranked stakeholders. Higher ranked stakeholders often have a broader perspective and think at a higher level of abstraction than other stakeholders.
The information obtained from the elicitation activities needs to be recorded with trace to the stakeholder register. In a data-centric approach, the elicited needs can be included in the MBSE system model, traced to the modeled stakeholders. A major benefit of practicing SE from a data-centric perspective is the increased use of models as analysis tools to both establish traceability between artifacts as well as enable the ability to view the information within the SoI’s integrated dataset from different perspectives depending on the needs of the project team members.
The individual outcomes from the elicitation activities represent the unique perspective of a stakeholder or group of stakeholders. These perspectives will be analyzed and integrated into an integrated set of needs.
Identify Drivers and Constraints
Drivers and constraints are things outside the project’s control that constrain or drive the solution space and represent a major source of needs and requirements that drive and constrain the life cycle concepts analysis and maturation activities as well as the solution space available to the design team. Drivers and Constraints can include design constraints (parts, materials, organizational design best practices, etc.), design standards, production constraints (existing technology, facilities, equipment, cost, throughput, etc.), human factors, (human/machine interface - HMI), regulations (law), operating environment (natural, induced), other environment (social, cultural), existing systems: (interactions, interfaces, dependencies), technology maturity, cost, schedule.
Concurrently with the stakeholder elicitation activities, drivers and constraints need to be identified and be recorded within the SOI’s integrated dataset. n a data-centric approach, the drivers and constraints can be included in the MBSE system model, wand trace to the life cycle concepts and inputs for development of the integrated set of needs.
Identify, Assess and Handle Risk
Risks are anything that could prevent the delivery of a successful SoI (providing what is needed, within budget and schedule, with the needed quality), anything that could impact the intended use of the SoI in its intended environment by its intended users, or anything that would allow unintended users to prevent the intended use of the SoI or to use the SOI in an unintended manner, e.g., hack into an aircraft and use the aircraft as a weapon. Risks can be classified as management, development, production, verification and validation, compliance, and operational.
As part of the elicitation activities, issues and risk must be identified and assessed. Stakeholders should be asked specifically about any issues and risk they think could prevent the SoI to be developed and delivered within budget, schedule, or risk during operations. Failing to address risk will result in an incomplete set of needs and resulting design input requirements resulting in a SoI that will fail system validation.
The project must do a risk assessment of each of the classes of risk discussed above. For each class of risk, the identified risks need to be recorded within the SoI’s integrated dataset and handled (accepted, monitored, researched, or mitigated) during the system life cycle concepts analysis and maturation activities (for further information, see Risk Management).
Risks could also lead to development of life cycle concepts as part of the mitigation (such as for hazards), which are expanded up further in the next section.
Life Cycle Concepts Analysis and Maturation
As a result of life cycle concept analysis and maturation activities discussed in this section, functional architectural and analytical/behavioral models are developed or expanded, and a preliminary physical architecture defined. Based on the resulting information, the preliminary set of life cycle concepts are transformed into a mature set of life cycle concepts that are consistent, correct, complete, and feasible. Models and diagrams are excellent analysis tools for defining and maturing feasible life cycle concepts by providing a context for needs and requirements and are key to help ensure correctness, completeness, and consistency of both individual needs and requirements and sets of needs and requirements. As part of life cycle concept maturation, functions are defined and relationships between those functions (interactions and interfaces) are identified. From this knowledge, functional flow block diagrams can be developed as well as context diagrams, boundary diagrams, and external interface diagrams. At this life cycle stage, the focus is on levels of abstraction and decomposition. Initially, high level functions are defined, e.g., “Process Inputs”. Then that function is decomposed into subfunctions, that together result in the parent function being realized, e.g., “Receive inputs”. “Store Raw Inputs”, “Transform Inputs”, “Store Transformed Inputs”, “Display Transformed Inputs”, “Export Transformed Inputs”.
Identified functions can then be transformed into a functional architecture and analytical/behavioral models which can, in turn, be transformed into a physical architecture. These models are excellent sources of needs and requirements dealing with functions, performance, and interactions between the subsystems and system elements within the system physical architecture as well as between the system and external systems in its operational environment. This integrated model can then be used during early system verification and system validation activities as well as during design verification and design validation using simulations to uncover issues before the SoI is built or coded.
As a minimum, the project team will need to use diagrams and models that clearly identify the functions and their inputs and outputs and interactions between the SoI and external systems and environment. As the models mature, functions are decomposed, lower-level architectures are defined, and subfunctions, performance, quality, physical attributes are allocated to the lower-level system elements. Supporting analytical/behavioral models can be developed to help assess behavior, interactions between parts of the architecture, and determine the “how well” performance characteristics of the functions.
Defining and agreeing on a set of feasible life cycle concepts for the SoI enables the project team to define an integrated set of needs based on those concepts.
Define and Baseline the Integrated Set of Needs
In accordance with the definition of a “need”, the project team derives an integrated set of needs that reflect the set of feasible system life cycle concepts, MGOs, measures, business operations level and system level stakeholder needs and stakeholder-owned system requirements, drivers and constraints, and risk mitigation. The integrated set of needs represent the agreed to outcomes of the stakeholder needs elicitation activities, definition of drivers and constraints, and life cycle analyses and maturation activities, as shown in Figure 4. These outcomes include results of the life cycle concepts analysis and maturation activity to determine expected functionality (what the stakeholders need the system to do), expected performance and quality (“how well” characteristics), the conditions of action, including triggering events, system states, and operating environments (“under what operating conditions”), as well as compliance with standards and regulations.
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Figure 4. Input into the Integrated Set of Needs. Figure from INCOSE Needs and Requirements Manual v1.1, Figure 4-12.
This integrated set of needs is what will be transformed into the set of design input requirements. In addition, it is this integrated set of needs which the set of design input requirements, the design, the set of design output specifications (such as drawings), and the realized system will be validated against.
Needs are written in a structured, natural language from the perspective of the what the stakeholders need the SoI to do, while the design input requirements transformed from the needs are written from the perspective of what the SoI must do to meet the need(s) from which they were transformed. To help distinguish needs from the requirements, the needs statements do not include the word “shall”, it is recommended to use a different format, such as: “The stakeholders need the system to ……….” or for a goal “The stakeholders would like the system to ……”. See Table 2 for example of need statements.
Table 2. Example of Need Statements. (SEBoK Original)
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The integrated set of needs must be recorded within the SoI’s integrated dataset in a form and media suitable for review and feedback from the stakeholders as well as a form that allows traceability. It is critical that the project team has confirmation from the stakeholders that the project team understands their expectations, needs, and requirements, MGOs, measures, drivers and constraints, and risk as communicated by integrated set of needs. Traceability is critical in support of needs verification and needs validation as discussed in Section 5 as well as change assessment and management. In a data-centric approach, the needs can be included in the MBSE system model, where they are traced to their source (life cycle model, stakeholder model, etc.).
To help with the development and organization of the requirements that will be transformed from the integrated set of needs, it is useful to organize the integrated set of needs into the following groupings: function/performance, fit, form, quality, and compliance.
Once the integrated set of needs is captured, the outputs from this effort is used to start the System Requirements definition process.
References
Works Cited
INCOSE. 2022. INOSE Needs and Requirements Manual, version 1.1. INCOSE-TP-2021-002-01.
INCOSE. 2022. INOSE Guide to Needs and Requirements Manual, version 1. INCOSE-TP-2021-003-01
Primary References
INCOSE. 2022. INOSE Needs and Requirements Manual, version 1.1. INCOSE-TP-2021-002-01.
INCOSE. 2022. INOSE Guide to Needs and Requirements Manual, version 1. INCOSE-TP-2021-003-01
ISO/IEC/IEEE. 2018. Systems and software engineering - Requirements engineering. Geneva, Switzerland: International Organization for Standardization (ISO)/International Electrotechnical Commission/ Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), (IEC), ISO/IEC/IEEE 29148.
ISO/IEC/IEEE. 2023. Systems and Software Engineering -- System Life Cycle Processes. Geneva, Switzerland: International Organisation for Standardisation / International Electrotechnical Commissions / Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. ISO/IEC/IEEE 15288:2015.
Additional References
OMG MBSE Wiki: omgwiki.org
Relevant Videos
- INCOSE Webinar, Lifecycle Concepts and Needs Definition
- How to Get Project Requirements from Project Stakeholders