Requirements Management Process

What is Requirements Management?

Requirements management is the set of activities that meets the need of the Client. The set of activities consist of documenting, tracing, prioritizing, analyzing an accepting on requirements and then controlling change and communicating to relevant stakeholders throughout a project lifecycle.

Why do we need to Plan Requirements Management Process?

In day to day Business, the major aspects of organizational strategies are improved by requirement management planning. The requirement management process helps us to understand the identification, documentation, analyzation and management of the business project.

The major and leading cause of project failure is the ineffective requirements Management process. So, this is the main reason why the Requirements Management issues should be addressed very early in the project life cycle. Early introduction will avoid the expensive procedure to resolve the design problems during the last stage of project development. The Requirements Management Process traces across the whole Project life cycle.

How does a Requirements Management process help a Project life cycle?

A proper Requirements Management Process improves all the major aspects of the Project life cycle in the following ways:

• Improves the quality of the Project.
• Helps in reducing the cost of the project by minimizing the errors.
• The project risks are decreased to several extends.
• The time taken for the project cycle also get reduced.

Components of Requirements Management Plan

• Project Outline and Planning: Creating a project charter and briefly describing the purpose of the project to all the stakeholders and readers and has to be reviewed by all the appropriate stakeholders.

• Requirement Gathering and Elicitation: Describing and documenting the requirement Process. This is a very long and daunting task. The process should ensure all the stated requirements are satisfied and it involves clarifying, organizing and prioritizing the information. Elicitation technique helps to understand and identify the challenges and constraints of various stakeholders.
• Roles and Responsibilities: The various roles involved in the Project life cycle are
  1. Project Manager- Heads and leads the project.
  2. Business Analyst- Gather, analyzes and document the requirements.
  3. Designer: Design solution for the requirements.
  4. Developer: Develops solution for the requirements.
  5. Tester: Verify the solution after the development.

The Requirements Management process is a mechanism which bring the roles together and engage them throughout the project cycle as per the needs.

• Requirements Management Tools: A requirement management tool help with multiple tasks such as documenting and storing requirement attributes, provide multiple views to different user groups, track requirements and facilitate the communication of requirements between various stakeholders.
• Requirements Traceability: It keeps track of all the requirements from the initial stage to the deployment stage and helps in connecting the dots. Traceability also makes sure that the project meets all the important requirements from various stakeholders.

• Change request management:  It is an essential component of Requirement management process. As it is very rare to know all the requirements during the initial stage of the project. Therefore, there will obviously be change requirement requests and the team should be prepared to handle them.

Role of Business Analyst in planning the Requirement Management Process

Business Analyst work very closely with the Project Manager in creating and planning a Requirements Management Process. BA will gather, analyze, verifying, document the requirements, monitoring and managing the changes to requirements. The Business analyst should ensure that the Requirements Management plan is implemented at the initial stage of the project cycle and strictly monitoring it throughout the Project cycle. Explained all the members of the team, the principles and the importance of the Requirements Management process and ensure all the participants are involved in the Requirements Managements Process Plan. Business analyst encourage a good communication among all the team members during the various stages of Project life cycle. The business analyst ensures the requirements configuration and baselining has been done in a standard way.

Conclusion

Therefore, adhering to the Requirements Management Process helps the team to focus on the Project by maintaining the integrity of the Requirements throughout the project lifecycle.