Stakeholders’ Needs, Wants and Expectations

Stakeholders can be defined as those individuals or groups that impact, or are impacted by, the operations of an organisation.

Identifying stakeholders’ needs, wants and expectations is necessary when designing and delivering solutions to satisfy stakeholders.  There is often confusion, however, distinguishing between these three areas and, although stakeholders may have a loose sense of what they’re after, they are not always best placed to differentiate between a need, a want and an expectation – stakeholders often need to be guided through the conversation to surface, clarify and capture these.

Stakeholders’ needs are typically linked to a specific problem – so, getting to the underlying problem is a great place to start.  For example, a stakeholder may state that they need a second car.  However, when this is teased out further, the underlying problem may be that they need ‘… to commute daily to their place of business’.

Stakeholders’ wants, on the other hand, can be quite easy to identify.  A want can be linked to stakeholders’ desires – for example, what stakeholders may actually want is a convenient, comfortable and eco-friendly means of traveling to and from work.

Stakeholders’ expectations are simply what is expected during the transaction.  Using the car analogy, expectations may include a travel time of no more than 45 minutes in normal traffic, reliability and cost effectiveness.

Designing and delivering business solutions is a complex undertaking.  Clarifying stakeholders’ needs, wants and expectations is an important place to start so that you can ‘begin with the end in mind’.  The aim is to meet stakeholders’ needs while satisfying as many of the often competing wants and expectations as possible to contribute to a successful business outcome.