A Guide to Requirements Management
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As a practical example, say your company is constructing a new distribution center that will bring hundreds of new jobs across multiple departments to the area, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in new equipment will be purchased. Without insight from all parties, team members, customer support, stakeholders, and the customer base, how do you know the requirements for a successful distribution center? This is where requirements management steps in to ensure the success of long-term projects such as a new distribution center.
Keep reading to learn more about requirements management solutions.
What is Requirements Management?
Requirements management is a frequentative set of project activities that comprises collecting, eliciting, and capturing requirements from all parties involved followed by documenting, prioritizing, refining, categorizing, and tracking requirements toward fulfillment. Part of requirements management is accommodating changes to all involved entities, progressing with approval, and adding in change control. This is a continuous process that remains throughout the entire project lifecycle.
Requirements management combines activities including gathering requirements, documentation, definition, analysis, and monitoring to ensure traceability of the project throughout its lifecycle. To put in simpler terms, requirements management is a sequence of the following:
Determining the functionality and features the stakeholders want in the project.
Agreeing on those requirements.
Refining the requirements to alter them into actionable items.
Prioritizing the requirements and eliminating non-feasible options.
Conveying changes to clients with their approval.
Itemizing the requirements into tasks to assign them to teams.
Tracking tasks until completion and the project is ready for deployment.
Why is Requirements Management an Important Process?
Requirements management is critical since it is the initial step to determining the end goal and ensuring the project meets the client’s expectations. According to studies conducted by the Project Management Institute (PMI), all considerable aspects of organizational strategy is improved by requirements management in the following manner:
Cost reduction
Effective scope management
Quality improvement
Risk decrease
Timeline decrease
How are Requirements Managed Within a Company?
The requirements management process conducted by an organization is comprised of five sections:
Requirements Gathering
Requirements gathering is generally considered the first step within requirements management since it involves laying the groundwork for requirements definition. This step starts with identifying and communicating with stakeholders and reviewing the existing set of problems that must be resolved. Once the study has been thoroughly conducted, different techniques formalize the requirement including, brainstorming, document analysis, holding a focus group, interface analysis, interviews, prototyping, questionnaires, requirement workshops, and research and observations. The methods outlined in the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge Guide are often used in this phase.
Requirements Refining
The next phase involves refining the needs that have been gathered and further categorizing them into operational requirements, transitional requirements, functional requirements, or technical requirements with assigned prioritization. Additional weeding and requirements analysis assists with determining which requirements are attainable and how the project can deliver them.
Requirements Negotiation
With many projects, there is a disagreement on the documented requirements by the time they trickle through the extensive gathering, analyzing, interpreting, and documenting the process. Clients and future users attempt to accommodate all considered features while expecting a high level of customer service. There is always a focus on compliance and cost-effectiveness while not exceeding budget, schedule, and human resources.
Requirements Negotiation Process
The negotiation process includes studying the stakeholders, knowing the proposed problems, asking open questions, listening, and understanding, setting ground rules, presenting a suitable negotiation method, defending your position, knowing the bottom line, and being prepared for all outcomes.
Sign-Off
Following a successful negotiation and agreement among all parties of a specific set of requirements, there must be a final sign-off. This is a legitimate indication that all actionable items have been agreed upon and all stakeholders understand the requirements.
Requirements management is a challenging and extensive process due to the number of stakeholders involved in a project. However, there are resources, such as using the best requirements management software, and in-house experience, that can help keep the flow of the discussion moving.