EasyWinWin Negotiations

Guidelines and EasyWinWin Report

This document contains guidelines for performing EasyWinWin negotiations for your project. All the team members should be involved in the negotiations. It is necessary to consult your customer for the negotiations, although the customer may not use the tool directly.

Step 1. Stakeholders

Identify the key stakeholders in your system. The following stakeholder roles are suggested you can add more or drop some for your project if required:

1. Customer

2. Administrator

3. User

4. Developer

5. Maintainer

6. Project Manager

7. Architect

…

Please decide who would serve as any of these roles through discussion with your team members.

Step 2. Review and Expand the Negotiation Topics

EasyWinWin schema has a basic taxonomy for the negotiation topics. The class web page has suggested taxonomy for various projects. Review these taxonomies and tailor the EasyWinWin taxonomy so that all the elements of the taxonomy are relevant to your project.

Step 3. Set Win Conditions

Identify the Win Conditions for your project’s stakeholders by going through the brainstorming, converging on the win conditions and prioritization. If the customer is not present, you have to consult with the customer to identify his Win Conditions and his priorities. Discuss the win conditions and appoint one of the team members as a surrogate customer if the customer would not be using the EasyWinWin tool.

It is necessary to use each taxonomy element through the various Win Conditions. It is also necessary to provide clear description and explain the rationale for your Win Conditions.

Step 4. Capture Glossary of Terms

Identify the terms that have special meaning within the context of your project. Those terms would require explanation to the different stakeholders. You have to write a definition for each term. You can add terms anytime during the negotiation.

Step 5. Prioritize Win Conditions

The team evaluates the Win Conditions. Stakeholders rate each one on a scale from 1 to 10 for each of two criteria: 1) Business Importance shows the relevance of a Win Condition to project/company success; 2) Ease of Implementation indicates perceived technical or economic constraints of implementing a Win Condition. In the voting process, developers focus on technical issues, while clients and users rate the business relevance.

Step 6. Identify Issues, Options and Negotiate on Agreements

Insert a tag to each of the Win Conditions (after the id you added earlier) indicating the priority category they belong to. Abbreviate them as follows:

• Low hanging fruits-LHF
• Maybe later-MLR
• Forget them-FGT
• Important with hurdles-IWH

Identify the Issues for the Win Conditions wherever there is a conflict or risk with the Win Conditions. Also include your name or role as an identifier in brackets. If the Issues may arise because of more than one Win Conditions, then add these Win Conditions numbers in brackets.

Once all the Issues have been identified, Options are proposed to resolve these Issues. Also include your name or role as an identifier in brackets. If the Option may resolve more than one issue, then add these Issues numbers in brackets.

Win Conditions for which no issues have been raised are usually declared agreements. But you need to negotiate agreements for options. It is extremely important to involve your customers in making agreements; especially those related to stakeholders’ Win Conditions. Also include the stakeholders who agree on the Agreements, date of the agreement, related Win Conditions and, if exists, Options. The deliverable for WinWinTree is a tree with Win Conditions as main headings and Issues, Options and Agreements as subheadings.

Finally, organize the WinWin artifacts (Win Conditions, Issues, Options and Agreements) into negotiation topics in order to improve organization and to check for completeness. Include the negotiation topic numbering in brackets. Make sure that all identified negotiation topics have been sufficiently covered in the process.

Step 7. Submitting results (EasyWinWin Report)

Create a report of the EasyWinWin negotiation in MS Word format. Submit a hard copy of the report and post the EasyWinWin report on your team web site.

The report should include:

• Include the stakeholders and their roles through negotiation.

• Agreed upon taxonomy (negotiation topics WITHOUT their comments) from Review and Expand Negotiation Topics activity.

• Captured project related terms (keywords) and ONLY these terms’ definitions from Capture Glossary of Terms activity.
• Charts for the Win Conditions prioritization as shown on page 93 (Results Charts) and 94 (XY chart showing distribution of the Win Conditions) of the EasyWinWin from Prioritize Win Conditions activity. If one chart will not display all Win Conditions correctly, you will select a set of Win Conditions sequentially and then produce a chart for each set. (Use print screen button to copy and paste the charts into your report)
• Win Conditions, if any, their identified Issues and Options, and final all Agreements from WinWinTree activity with the formatted way shown below:

…

1.2 W5 [IWH] The program should have an expert system [2.1]

1.2.1 I1 Complex if to be implemented in full. [DEVELOPER] [W2] [2.1]

1.2.1.1 O1 Use predetermined models through program codes [CUSTOMER, DEVELOPER] [I1] [2.1]

1.2.1.1.1 A2 An expert system will be implemented, but the models will be predefined [DEVELOPER, CUSTOMER:09/28/2000] [W2, O1] [2.1]

…

1.7 W9 [MLR] Rendering a graph on the fly [2.1]

1.3.1 A3 If time permits, we will include rendering graphs on the fly [CUSTOMER, DEVELOPER:09/28/2000] [W9] [2.1]

…

3. Level of Service

3.1 W4 [LHF] Secure system, only secure connections [4.2]

3.1.1 A14 The system will be secure preventing any access points from being created [CUSTOMER, ARCHITECT:09/28/2000] [W4] [4.2]

…