Can outside-in fix the bottleneck of stakeholder misalignment?

Jim Johnson argues that stakeholder alignment is a major bottleneck on innovation. As Jim puts it, this problem leads to “100’s of billions of dollars a year of waste” – yikes!

Can outside-in development help fix this stakeholder misalignment nightmare? You bet. But first, we have to be very clear on the different aspects of alignment.

As Jim points out, balancing ad hoc views of executive goals against desired outcomes is painful and costly. This is a good example of why John Sweitzer and I started our book with a focus on stakeholders – identifying them and understanding their goals. Within a company, stakeholder alignment can be used to help teams work toward a common goal.

Another important aspect of stakeholder alignment is to emphasize the need for developers to stay in sync with where their stakeholders want to go. What does the business hope to achieve when it deploys your software? The better the alignment, the more relevant the software.

We introduced the need to understand the organizational context in which your software will be used. For example, capabilities that are valuable to a centralized firm are different from those needed in a decentralized environment. (See Chapter three.)

Jim’s told us how important it is to elevate “general business awareness of the overall consequences of the bottleneck of stakeholder alignment.” He’s quite right, and outside-in thinking can go a long way to help. Looks like we need CIOs and CFOs getting into outside-in thinking as well as their developer, product manager and marketing colleagues.

(Image attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=803997580&size=m; by paparutzl)