Requirements management is an ongoing process that is maintained throughout the project lifecycle, and is the process of capturing, assessing and justifying stakeholders wants and needs.
It requires the capture of requirements from a structured process, and this process should incrementally breakdown the requirements in a hierarchical manner, considering different conditions and scenarios.
The requirements, and once defined, must be validated with the project sponsor perhaps including other key stakeholders to ensure the full scope has been captured.
Such requirements become the principal project deliverables, and it therefore helps to define the project scope. This allows the project team to understand the exact deliverables of the project and how the work will be structured to meet the requirements and deliver the scope.
Once initial identification of requirements has been undertaken, system analysis can then be undertaken looking at each requirement in turn and analyzing the risks, assumptions, interfaces, dependencies, opportunities and constraints associated with the requirement.
This will then allow the design and build phase of the project which is often the implementation phase of the project lifecycle.
Ideally, each phase would be completed prior to the next one starting, but in reality this process is often iterative and cyclical, with requirements being continually analysed an evaluated whilst the design is being finalized and build has commenced.
A requirement must be described in such a way that meets the following criteria:
Once all project requirements have been satisfied, then the project is complete.
When defining requirements, it is important to consider what the acceptance criteria will be and how these will be defined. It may be useful to examine requirements and acceptance criteria useful previous projects of a similar nature.
It is also important to take standards, legal acts and regulations to be complied with into account when requirements are defined.
These can be seen as the inputs necessary for requirements management to be successful: