Understanding organisational needs and stakeholder requirements

Selecting appropriate people technology begins long before any supplier is contacted or product demonstration scheduled. This video, part of the FREE02 People Professional Technologies unit, addresses Assessment Criterion 2.1 by walking through the key steps that underpin sound technology selection. The opening focus falls on needs analysis as the foundational discipline — examining current process flows, identifying bottlenecks and errors, and establishing a baseline against which any proposed solution can be measured. Crucially, the video also addresses how future organisational change, including growth, restructuring and regulatory adaptation, must be factored into that analysis rather than limiting the scope to present-day challenges.

A substantial portion of the video is devoted to stakeholder requirements, distinguishing between the distinct needs of senior leaders, line managers, employees and external parties such as job candidates and pension providers. The video treats these as genuinely different requirement sets rather than variations of a single list, and it introduces user personas as a structured technique for keeping those differences visible throughout the selection process. Personas are illustrated through concrete contrasting examples — including a warehouse supervisor with restricted computer access and a graduate employee expecting consumer-grade self-service — to demonstrate how abstract requirements translate into practical evaluation questions.

The video also touches on why gathering input from multiple organisational perspectives matters for avoiding blind spots in the requirements-gathering stage. Taken together, the needs analysis, stakeholder requirements mapping and persona development covered here form the groundwork for the evaluation criteria, scoring, integration considerations, accessibility factors, data and security requirements, supplier due diligence, and total cost of ownership questions that technology selection in a people professional context demands.