Stakeholder Analysis with CUSTOM
Users vs Stakeholders
A very common Tripos trap (flagged explicitly in supervision material) is treating “stakeholders” as synonymous with “users.” In a hospital system, doctors may be the users — but hospital managers, patients, IT support staff, and regulatory bodies are also stakeholders whose needs and constraints matter. The relationship is: all users are stakeholders, but not all stakeholders are users.
CUSTOM: Four Kinds of Stakeholder
The CUSTOM framework identifies four categories:
| Type | Who they are | Example (hospital records system) |
|---|---|---|
| Primary stakeholders | Direct, frequent users of the system — the people who actually operate the interface day to day | Doctors and nurses entering and reading patient data |
| Secondary stakeholders | Occasional users, or those who interact with the system via an intermediary (e.g. a patient seeing their results through a portal, or a manager who only logs in monthly for reports) | Patients viewing their own records through a portal; a ward manager generating monthly statistics |
| Tertiary stakeholders | People affected by the system but who never interact with it directly — the system’s outputs or consequences affect them without them ever touching the interface | Patients whose treatment depends on the data but who never see the screen; the hospital’s legal and compliance department; the public whose health outcomes depend on the system’s accuracy |
| Facilitating stakeholders | Those involved in designing, developing, deploying, or maintaining the system — they do not generally use it for its intended purpose, but their work enables it | The UX design team; the software engineers who build and maintain it; IT support who troubleshoot it; trainers who teach staff to use it |
Why CUSTOM Matters for Design
Each stakeholder type has different needs, and those needs can conflict:
- Primary stakeholders (doctors) want efficiency: minimal clicks, dense information, fast data entry.
- Tertiary stakeholders (patients) want accuracy and privacy of their data, even if it slows the interface down.
- Facilitating stakeholders (IT support) want robust logging, clear error messages, and simple deployment — features invisible to the primary user.
A design that optimises for the primary stakeholder alone may fail because it ignores the tertiary stakeholder whose legal rights are violated by insufficient data protection, or the facilitating stakeholder whose maintenance burden is unsustainable. The CUSTOM analysis forces the team to consider all these perspectives at the requirements stage, when re-design is still cheap.
The “Users ≠ Stakeholders” Exam Trap
In any Tripos question involving stakeholder analysis, the mark scheme expects you to demonstrate that you understand the difference. Specifically:
Always name at least one stakeholder who is not a direct user.
For example, in a question about a university course-feedback system:
- Primary stakeholders: students filling out the feedback forms.
- Secondary: lecturers reading the aggregated feedback.
- Tertiary: the university administration making curriculum decisions based on the data; future students whose course choices are informed by the published results.
- Facilitating: the IT team maintaining the feedback platform.
If you only list students and lecturers, you have missed the distinction between stakeholders and users. Add at least one tertiary or facilitating stakeholder to demonstrate the breadth of analysis.
Expected Learning
- Define the four CUSTOM stakeholder categories and give a specific example of each for any given system scenario.
- Explain why “users ≠ stakeholders” and name at least one stakeholder who is not a direct user in a given scenario.
- Describe how conflicting stakeholder needs can drive design trade-offs, with a concrete example.
- Apply CUSTOM analysis as the opening framework for any “design a system” exam question.
Past Paper Questions
Stakeholder analysis appears in every Tripos sitting. 2024 Q5 asks about stakeholder groups for ChatGPT; 2022 Q6 asks about stakeholders for a COVID-19 contact-tracing app; 2020 Q6 asks about stakeholders for a weather app; 2018 Q6 asks about CUSTOM stakeholders for an order-search system. The Supervision 1 answer for the taxi/ATC question models the full CUSTOM breakdown.