Managing stakeholders through persona

Introduction/Summary

In 1983 Allan Cooper was the first to implement the use of Personas in a Software Development project and popularized in his book “The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity”. The project participants quickly saw the benefits of using the “Personas” and naturally began referring to them during their project work as a reference to the users (The Cooper Journal: The Origin of Personas, n.d.). The method “Personas” is mainly used in design projects and the project participants together create a fictive profile to represent the users/stakeholder. This helps to ensure a user centric perspective and to humanize the design process when doing design projects. However, the method can also be applied to project management, helping managing the many stakeholders and ease the communication when using personas as a boundary object (Martin & Hanington, 2012). This article will first describe the idea behind the personas tool/method and how it can contribute to project management, then a guide of how to apply it in projects and finally the limitations involved when using personas.