What is requirement life cycle management? What are the requirements?

Requirements life cycle management is the knowledge area that describes the tasks that a business analyst performs to manage and maintain requirements from initiation right through to final implementation.

The process includes monitoring, planning, analyzing, managing, and communicating organizational requirements. So it’s clear that managing the life cycle of requirements can have a deciding impact on the outcome of the project. Managing requirements life cycle requires a business analyst to manage and maintain requirements while identifying relationships with designs, assessing changes, and helping reach consensus on those changes.

The objective of requirements life cycle management is to provide an environment where all of the analysis crucial elements – the business itself, stakeholders, requirements, and design are aligned with each other and ensure that the solution properly implements those requirements and designs. When conducted in the right way, requirements management doesn’t end with the implementation of the solution, but it continues to provide value as long as that solution is in use.

The BAs trace requirements to the solution components and align the solution with the need. During this process, they cooperate with interested stakeholders on the understanding and approval of requirements. The goal is to maintain requirements in a way that will provide future value and that is only possible through understanding the organizational context in which these activities take place.

The knowledge area of requirements life cycle management involves five tasks that a business analyst needs to perform: trace requirements, maintain requirements, priorities requirements, asses requirements changes, and approve requirements.

A business requirements analysis is all about identifying, analyzing, and documenting the key requirements related to a business problem that needs to be solved or an organizational objective that needs to be met.

1. Business requirements
2. Stakeholders requirements
3. Solution requirements
4. Functional requirements
5. Non – functional requirements
6. Transition requirements

This is the foundation of a successful procurement project:

• First, define each requirement clearly so that you can assess the time and resources you will need to allocate to the project
• This first step will help you understand the difference between need-to-have features and nice-to-have features in the solution you’re looking for
• It is also the first step on the way to making the vendor selection process as smooth as possible.

And while identifying business requirements may seem simple enough, a thorough analysis of these requirements involves several important steps:

1. Gathering stakeholder requirements
2. Categorizing stakeholder requirements
3. Analyzing and interpreting requirements
4. Documenting requirements