Collect Requirements

-Rikesh Mathew

Collect Requirements

Develop Project Charter

Project Integration Management is the specific responsibility of the project manager andit cannot be delegated or transferred. The project manager is the one that combines theresults from all the other Knowledge Areas to provide an overall view of the project. Theproject manager is ultimately responsible for the project as a whole.Projects and project management are integrative by nature, with most tasks involvingmore than one Knowledge Area.The relationships of processes within the Project Management Process Groups andbetween the Project Management ProcessProject Integration Management is about:Ensuring that the due dates of project deliverables, the project life cycle, and thebenefits realization plan are aligned;Providing a project management plan to achieve the project objectives;Ensuring the creation and the use of appropriate knowledge to and from theproject;Managing project performance and changes to the project activities;Making integrated decisions regarding key changes impacting the project;Measuring and monitoring progress and taking appropriate action;Collecting, analyzing and communicating project information to relevantstakeholders;Completing all the work of the project and formally closing each phase, contract,and the project as a whole; andManaging phase transitions when necessary

PM Process Group

: Planning

Knowledge Group
PM Knowledge Area

Scope

Scope Knowledge Area

What are requirements?

  • The quantified and documented needs of sponsor, customer and stakeholders
  • Requirements become the foundation for WBS, cost, schedule, quality, procurement etc.
  • If you miss a requirement, it will be very costly to implement once it moves to the execution phase

Types of Requirements

i. Business
  • Describes business issues or opportunities
  • Describes reason why project was chosen
ii. Stakeholder
  • Describes needs of stakeholders
iii. Solutions
  • Describes features, functions and characteristics
  • Can be functional and non-functional

What does it do?

  • Process of determining, documenting and managing stakeholder needs or requirements to meet project objectives.
  • Acceptance among stakeholders increase if they know that their opinions have been taken into account
  • Requirements must be taken into account in the start as implementing it later is expensive
  • Requirements are tracked through the entire lifecycle

ITTO

Inputs

1. Project Charter
  • Defines high-level description and requirements to build detailed requirements
2. Project Management plan
i. Scope Management Plan
  • Documents what type of requirements must be collected
ii. Requirements Management Plan
  • The process required by the team to collect requirements
iii. Stakeholder Management Plan
  • Understands stakeholders communication requirements and level of engagement
3. Project Documents
i. Assumption Log
  • Identifies and track assumptions of the project 
ii. Lessons Learned Register
  • Provides best practices on collecting requirements
iii. Stakeholder Register
  • Identify stakeholders who can provide requirements
4. Business Documents
  • Business case includes description of business needs
5. Agreements
  • May contain project/product requirements
6. Enterprise Environmental Factors (EEF)
  • Factors that are out of your control but that can influence your project
  • Includes
      1. Organizations Culture
      2. Infrastructure
      3. Marketplace conditions
7. Operational Process Assets (OPA)
  • The way your organization wants you to run your projects which includes templates
  • Includes the 4 P’s – Plan, Processes, Procedures & Policy
  • Lessons Learned knowledge base
  • Historical Information

Tools & Techniques

1. Expert Judgement
  • Groups or Individuals with specialised knowledge to assess a specific domain including
      1. Business analyst
      2. Requirements elicitation
      3. Diagramming techniques
2. Data Gathering
i. Brainstorming
  • Generate and collect ideas related to project requirements
ii. Interviews
  • Usually done one on one
  • You prepare questions beforehand
  • A good technique to obtain confidential information
iii. Focus Groups
  • Brings a group of stakeholders and subject matter experts together to discuss project management and integration approaches
iv. Questionnaires & Surveys
  • Written set of questions sent to a large number of participants. 
  • Good method to quickly accumulate a large amount of information from a large number of participants
v. Benchmarking
  • Compare the actual or planned process to best practices.
3. Data Analysis
i. Document Analysis
  • Reviewing relevant documents to gather requirements
  • Includes agreements, business plan, issue logs, policies, procedures etc
4. Decision Making
i. Voting
  • You select the winner by selecting from 3 possible choices
      1. Unanimity: Everyone agrees
      2. Majority: 50%+ agrees
      3. Plurality: Largest block agrees
ii. Autocratic decision making
  • One individual makes the decision
iii. Multicriteria decision making
  • Decision matrix used to systematically evaluate and rank options based on weight.
  • Basically works like a weighted average
5. Data Representation
i. Affinity diagram
  • Allows a large number of ideas to be classified into groups
ii. Mind mapping
  • Consolidates ideas from a single brainstorming session to a single map
6. Interpersonal & Team Skills
i. Nominal Group Technique
  • Brainstorming with voting process
  • Prioritize ideas from most useful to least useful
  • 4 steps:
      1. Prose a question to group
      2. Moderator writes down ideas on flipchart
      3. Idea discussed till everyone understands
      4. Private vote on the ideas. Highest voted ideas are selected and this may take several rounds.
ii. Observation/conversation
  • Direct way of viewing individuals to see how they perform tasks and carry out processes
  • Helpful for detailing processes
  • Helps uncover hidden requirements about the process or procedure
ii. Facilitation
  • Focussed sessions used to define project requirements between cross-functional teams and to reconcile differences.
  • Done to moderate the group
  • 3 types
      1. Joint Application Design: Used in the software development industry. Brings business experts and development team together to gather requirements
      2. Quality Function Deployment (QFD): Used in the manufacturing industry. helps determine critical characteristics of new products. It collects customer needs or “Voice of the customer”. Needs are sorted and prioritized
      3. User Stories: Short textual description of required functionality. Describes stakeholder role, beneficiaries, stakeholder goal and motivation.
7. Context Diagram
  • Example of a scope model
  • Shows how people interact with your system
  • Shows input to the system, actors providing the input, outputs and actors receiving the output
8. Prototypes
  • Models of the proposed product.
  • Helps obtain early feedback on the working model
  • You may need to produce several prototypes iteratively to incorporate feedback
  • Includes proof of concept, mockups, wireframes etc.

Outputs

1. Requirements Documentation
  • Describes how individual requirements will meet business needs
  • Requirements will start off at a high level and become more detailed
  • A requirement must be unambiguous, measurable, trackable & testable
  • It is a good idea to categorize these requirements when dealing with a large project.
  • They can be classified as
i. Business requirements
  • High level needs of the organization
ii. Stakeholder requirements
  • Needs of a stakeholder
iii. Solution requirements
  • Features, functions and characteristics of the product, service or result that will meet business and stakeholder requirements.
  • Types include:
      1. Functional requirements: Describe the behaviours of the product
      2. Nonfunctional requirements: Environmental conditions required for the product to be effective
iv. Transition & readiness requirements
  • Temporary capabilities such as data conversion and training requirements to transition from the current state to desired future state
v. Project requirements
  • Actions, processes or other conditions the projects need to meet
  • Includes milestone dates, contractual obligations, constraints etc
vi. Quality requirements
  • Capture any condition to validate successful completion of the project
  • Includes tests, certifdications wtc
2. Requirements Traceability Matrix
  • Grid that links the requirements to the deliverables that satisfy them
  • Helps ensure each requirement adds business value
  • Provides structure to track requirements through lifecycle
  • Provides structure for managing changes
  • Requirement attributes are included in the matrix (active, cancelled, approved, completed)

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