Question

What is involved in collecting requirements for a project? Why is it often difficult to do?

Answer 1

The Collect Requirement is a process which defines the goals of the project management mission, as well as documents and maintains the needs and requirements of the shareholders. It is an important part of the project that helps to establish project scope throughout project management.

Management of the project scope includes:-

· Planning the scope of the project in a scope management plan,

· Identifying the scope of the project in a project scope statement and

· Creating a work breakdown structure (WBS) that decomposes and details the activities involved in the project and their expected completion times

· Collecting a project requirement involves defining and documenting the product features and functions for the project, and also the procedures used to create them.

The project team produces reports of specifications and a matrix of quality control criteria as outputs of the selection process.

Requirements are obtained in many ways:

· Interviewing shareholders;

· Conducting focus groups, questionnaires, and surveys, etc.

· Prototyping and document analysis are common techniques to collect requirements for software development projects.

The complexity usually relates directly to the degree of project instability. What usually happens is that people want to force-fit all projects into standard plan-driven project management irrespective of the degree of complexity and attempt to create comprehensive specifications before the project begins.