Who are stakeholders for program design?

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A stakeholder is a person or a group that has an influence on a business or that can be affected by the decisions of that business. Internal stakeholders are those who are directly employed by or who own the business. External stakeholders are those who are otherwise connected to the business. For example, a bakery’s internal stakeholders would include the owner, the manager, the bakers, the people who work behind the counter and the staff who maintains the cleanliness of the floor, shop windows and baking utensils. The external shareholders are the customers who come to buy bread, cake and cookies from the bakery, the bank that extends loans to the bakery from time to time or just accepts deposits from the bakery and stands behind the checks it writes, the suppliers of the bakery who regularly deliver truckloads of flour, sugar, eggs, and cardboard boxes for packing the baked goods and the government that regulates the way the bakery does business and that collects sales taxes.

Another way to look at the topic is to divide the stakeholders into market stakeholders (also known as primary stakeholders) and non-market stakeholders (secondary stakeholders). The market stakeholders have financial dealings with the business. The non-market ones do not. In the bakery example, the market stakeholders would include the owner, employees, customers, bank, other investors, suppliers and government. The non-market stakeholders would be the media, the school that sends a few classes to the bakery every year for a field trip to see how bread is made or a bakers’ union or trade group.

In recent decades, the term stakeholder has been broadened even more to include anyone who has a “stake” (or an interest) in the business and what it does. In the bakery model, it would include the neighbors who wonder what kind of effect the bakery will have on the neighborhood and property values, the local Weight Watchers group which may notice a surge in attendance and other nearby bakeries which may be in competition with the first. A stockholder, in contrast, is a person or group that legally owns shares of stock in a business.

A project stakeholder is a person or group that either sponsors, participates in, or has an interest in a particular project. They either affect the project or are affected by the project and include the project leader, the members of the team, the client for whom the team is working, project testers and users, the upper management of the company that the project team works for, etc.

Program design is the step programmers take before writing new computer programs (or revising previous ones). It consists of understanding how they want the program to work and using whatever design tools that are appropriate in order to create a model and developing test data. Some design tools are flowcharts, hierarchy charts and diagrams.

The stakeholders in program design would be the programmers who are designing the program, additional writers, if necessary, the supervisor of the project, the upper management of the company that hired the programmer, the client for whom the programmer is writing the program, the QA (quality assurance) team that tests the program, the end users of the program and whoever else is impacted by this newly designed program such as future programmers who may need to modify parts. It could be that this group of stakeholders also includes the computers themselves, as programming language is intended for two disparate groups- human beings and computers. Using the definition that a stakeholder is a person or group that affects or is influenced by the actions of a corporation, computers (which are definitely influenced by what the programmer writes) can also be considered as stakeholders.

Resource by Will

I am the editor for TheFreeResource.com, and owner of LinchpinSEO, a small business content creation company. The Free Resource has a select community of talented writers, teachers, and business people (and we are always looking for more) that bring you the most trusted resources on the web and credible articles about many topics.

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