Identifying Stakeholders

See also instruction

case study

• As people go green, there is an increased need for information on the facilities for cycling and pedestrian traffic in cities.
• The tutorials for this course will develop an application that allows citizens to find information about these facilities.
• Assume that you have been hired as a consulting company for the city of Hamilton to provide a mobile application (codename: BikeTour) for these facilities

Task 1

Identify the stakeholders of the following software system.

Brainstorm a collection of stakeholders that you should consult for this application.

Differentiate the direct stakeholders from the indirect ones. Reminder: A stakeholder is any individual/group/org with a vested interest in your product

1. direct:
   • City of Hamilton
   • Hamilton cyclist
   • Pedestrians and other active transportation users
2. indirect
   • Hamilton City Council
     • decision on infrastructure billing

• Government
  • properties developers
  • Nearby municipalities with connecting transportation (i.e: Dundas, Burlington, etc.)
  • Local academia institution who might benefit from this infrastructures.
  • Cycling advocacy groups

Task 2

What other requirements sources could be used to develop that product?

Brainstorm a collection of requirements sources for this application.

• regulations and industry “best-practice”
  • municipals bylaws and official plans
  • accesibility guidelines
• cycling apps engagement strategies
  • social media
  • local newspapers
  • similar functionalities
• existing transport data
  • cycling volumes, traffic, collisions stats
  • bike share data, transit network data (enable multi-modal planning trips)
• User research / stakeholders input
  • Surveys, “blind studies”, interviews with users
  • Testing and feedback loop
    • refinement of functionality
• Technical requirements

Task 3

Perform an analysis of what types of elicitation methods would be appropriate for your identified stakeholders.

• Interviews

  • Focus on the needs of the stakeholders (one-on-one), allowing detailed discussions with subject matters experts opinions

• Focus groups

  • Organize focus groups with Hamilton cyclists and pedestrians to get direct feedback on their needs, experiences, and expectations from the app

• Surveys

  • Gather feedback from a large number of users through surveys to gather requirements.
  • Building knowledge base, existing documents (i.e: city bylaws, municipality plans, etc.) ⇒ inform elicitation process

• Brainstorming sessions

  • conduct sessions with diverse stakeholders to generate possible solutions

Task 4

Identify your “most-valuable” stakeholder(s) and the most valuable feature(s) BikeTour can bring to them Write a couple of scenarios

1. discovering new routes Sarah is an avid cyclist living in Hamilton. She commutes to work by bike daily but is getting bored of her usual route. She opens up the BikeTour app, selects her starting point and destination, and browses the suggested route options. She filters for routes that are scenic but still bike-friendly and direct enough for commuting. The app displays several new route options with elevation profiles, estimated trip duration, and route difficulty ratings sourced from other local cyclists’ trip data.

2. data-driven cycling infrastructure planning Trevor is a PM in City of Hamilton’s Sustainable Mobility Department. He is working on prioritising new cycling infrastuctures projects for the coming calendar year. Trevor logs into the BikeTour admin dashboard and views the aggregated, anonymized trip data from Hamilton cyclists using the app. A heatmap shows the most popular cycling routes, while another data visualization identifies “problem areas” with frequent cyclist-reported issues like potholes, close calls with cars, or inadequate bike parking. By cross-referencing this crowdsourced data from actual Hamilton cyclists with the city’s existing cycling network data, Trevor can easily identify key gaps and safety hotspots.