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.

The idea Behind Personas

What is a persona:

A persona is usually a one page description of a fictive character including a:

• A bio with basic information such as: name, age, education and occupation.
• Illustration of how the person could look. Often a stock photo of sketch, to avoid any connection to a real identity person.
• A quote summarizing some of the main points about the persona, for an easy reference.
• More in depth description about life situation, goals and behaviour (Martin & Hanington, 2012).

Here I will more describing text about the benefits of using personas. I have from two different sources defined the most important points to include. Points from (Martin & Hanington, 2012) Create useful design targets Behaviour pattern amongst user groups Easy communication of users and Presuvissum reference when communicating research summaries to clients.

Points from (Lidwell et al., 2010) Creating archetypal users representing a subpopulation of users The should be created early in the project. The fewer the better, representing the target audience

An important part of defining a persona is to remember only to include the information, that is relevant in relation to the given project. The information should be kept short and to the point, to ensure that they most important points stand out. A key rule is that the text amount should be kept to a one eye span, so that the information easily can be captured (Lidwell et al., 2010). When forming one or several personas, it’s important to do the correct research for the foundation of the persona. The information needed for the person can be through achieved through both qualitative or quantitative data in form of interviews, observations, focus groups, demographics or questionaries.

Here I will add information about the time it takes and resource demand. Takes a long time approx. 1 month (Lidwell et al., 2010) and resources have to be invested (Adlin & Pruitt, 2010).Furthermore it’s important to remember that a persona is created for a specific project, so it’s not supposed to be reused for other projects (Fuglerud et al., 2020).

How to apply the use of personas within project management

Here I will write about how it will be applied to project management and the benefits of it. The following point have been defined, but needs to be explained further. Help making better decisions (Adlin & Pruitt, 2010). Ease the communication (Martin & Hanington, 2012). Representative for absent stakeholders in a project (Woods et al., 2017). Ensure that requirements are prioritized to specific needs of the most high value users (Martin & Hanington, 2012). More literature on this topic is still being research.

Application of Personas

In this section I will describe in depth how to use personas. How to apply the use of personas can be divided into five stages, according to the book “The essential persona lifecycle” (Adlin & Pruitt, 2010). These stages will be explained in depth in the following paragraph.

• Phase 1: in this phase the main focus is to form the team that is creating the personas and start the initial collecting of data and research for the persona.
• Phase 2:
• Phase 3:
• Phase 4:
• Phase: 5

Use affinity diagram to sort the data in the beginning (Martin & Hanington, 2012)