Heritage Arboretum Development Project

Stakeholder Analysis and Communication Planning While Creating an Arboretum During a Pandemic

We identified stakeholders by first reviewing our vision statement and then asking who might be interested in or have some influence over the arboretum. Our vision states that we want to showcase native plants, educate citizens, and increase value. With that in mind, we identified citizens, teachers, greenspace inspector, events coordinator, and maintenance supervisor as stakeholders.

In an effort to understand their perspectives and offer value, we started by providing design ideas that became more refined with feedback. To build relationships, we continue to share the vision and seek to understand their concerns. We prioritize work that adds the most value from their perspectives and include interested stakeholders in our planning.

We work closely with our product owner, maintain transparency, and educate stakeholders on their roles. As with any project, we need to tailor our approach to the organization, the project, and the participants. Meetings have been a challenge. We have had just one large meeting with multiple stakeholders in attendance, outside at the arboretum with all participants wearing masks and viewing copies of a high-resolution map of the arboretum.

More often the best we could do is to have some small meetings of two or three team members and then follow that up with electronic communication and phone calls with members who could not attend. Backlog refining meetings are first between the product owner and scrum master, and then the scrum master works with the rest of the team, meeting together when possible and in smaller groups or individually when needed. Some of those meetings (which could also be considered sprint planning as backlog refinement) have led directly to the choice of what to do in each sprint. Both backlog refinement and sprint planning are conducted on-site when possible. Our demonstration meetings are every two months at the end of sprints as we report progress to the Tree Committee who we report to. We are still challenged to have daily scrums (even weekly as all team members have other work and this is an outside service project). We also need to perform retrospectives as we meet a bit more often.

1. Who are stakeholders (list several groups) and what are the concerns for each?
2. What communication challenges is this virtual, volunteer team experiencing and how do they overcoming them?
3. What could they do for conducting meetings?