Few Tips for Successful Requirements Management

Bad requirement management is the leading cause of a project failure. Utilizing requirements management helps improve the chances of project success. This leads to the question: How to Manage Project Requirements?

What are Requirements?

Requirements are the list of capabilities that a product must have to satisfy a user's need to solve any problem. Requirements are generally not cast in stone and can come from a number of sources such as a business need, market need, a business problem, competition, etc.

Users gather insights of their actual needs with time so that they can change their minds about requirements any time. Therefore requirements should be managed smartly in anticipation of any requirement change.

Why Manage Requirements?

Efficient requirement management process reduces the probability of skipping important requirements and ensures that major requirements are prioritized while less critical requirements are scheduled for later fix. Some people do it by using excel sheets but you cannot effectively manage bulk requirements in excel sheets.

Here are some tips you must keep in mind while managing requirements:

1. Prioritize Your Requirements: To manage requirements effectively, you must need to understand which requirement should come first. Then you need to prioritize all the requirements to decide their order of implementation. Prioritization is done by considering the positive impact, cost and risks of implementing a requirement and after that compare it with other requirements.

2. Organize Review Sessions: Requirements review sessions help in ensuring that stakeholders can understand the requirements properly and identify the ambiguities, inconsistencies and omissions. Before organizing the review session, you need to ensure that the requirements are correct, complete and realistic.

3. Conduct Impact Analysis: Any change in requirement should only be implemented after a broad impact analysis. Change request does not always translate into a requirement and all changes must be analyzed to decide their merit for addition in current phase or future phase, as well as their impact on requirements and other project elements.

4. Requirements Tracing: Requirements are linked to other requirements or business objectives, business rules, test cases etc. For effectively managing the requirements you need to identify the link between these elements throughout the lifecycle of project. Maintaining requirement traceability assures that a full impact analysis can be done in case of any change requests are made.

5. Store Requirement Attributes: It's always helpful to identify, record and update key attributes of requirements. Attributes helps in defining the context of requirements. Example: Priority, Rationale, Source, Status, Release versions and other relevant information.

6. Use Requirement Management Tools: Requirements management tools enable users to easily store and manage requirements (See The Insider’s Guide to Requirements Management Tools). RM Tools are meant to reduce the work of managing requirements by reducing the inconvenience of manual intercession.