| Print | Back | Close |

Techniques for Collecting Requirements

Collecting project requirements

The Collect Requirements process is what you use to gather the requirements a project must meet. The PMBOK® Guide, describes it as determining, documenting, and managing stakeholder needs and requirements to meet project objectives. The key benefit of this process is that it provides the basis for defining and managing the project scope – including product scope.

Requirements are functions or features a product must have, as well as needs that stakeholders want to have met in a project's final result. So requirements depend on the attributes of a product and on the client's needs.

Getting to a final set of project requirements isn't as simple as just asking stakeholders what they need. Often stakeholders start with very general ideas of what they want. You have to narrow these ideas down into specifics to make sure you understand what's really required. This is also important so you don't end up with a long list of requirements that aren't really essential or product specifications that are too detailed. If this happens, a project's scope is likely to get ahead of what stakeholders have in mind.

It's vital to define and document requirements in as much detail as possible for the following reasons:

• they represent the customer's and other stakeholders' expectations
• they form the basis for a project's work breakdown structure – otherwise known as the WBS – and for all cost, time, and quality planning, and finally
• they are needed for control purposes, so you can make decisions for a project quickly and efficiently

The inputs for the Collect Requirements process are:

• project charter – The project charter identifies high-level requirements. It also provides a high-level description of the product or service a project must deliver.
• stakeholder register – The stakeholder register lists stakeholders for the project. The project's results must meet their needs. So you need to consult stakeholders for detailed information about a project's requirements.
• scope management plan – The scope management plan provides direction on how project teams should determine which types of requirements need to be collected.
• requirements management plan – The requirements management plan outlines processes that will be used to define and document stakeholder needs.
• stakeholder management plan – The stakeholder management plan details stakeholder communications requirements and the level of stakeholder engagement necessary. Information in the plan is used in the Collect Requirements process as a guide to determine which stakeholders to involve in requirements activities and how best to do so.

Tools and techniques

One technique you can use to collect project requirements is to conduct interviews with stakeholders, subject matter experts, and people who've worked on related projects. These people can help you identify what features and functions a product or service should have. Most often, you hold one-on-one interviews. You ask the person you interview a set of questions you've prepared and any other questions that come up. And you record the person's responses.

Focus groups are a less formal way of collecting project requirements. In a group of stakeholders and subject matter experts, you guide an interactive discussion about what a proposed product or service must deliver. This can help you find out what expectations the stakeholders have. Usually, a focus group includes stakeholders with a similar role or perspective. You use the group to collect requirements focused on a specific aspect of a project, like the design of a product or the technical requirements it must meet.

Questionnaires and surveys let you gather responses to a set of written questions. Using these tools, you can get information from a large number of people quickly. And information gathered in this way can usually be evaluated using statistical analysis.

Group creativity techniques are activities you use to help create a list of potential requirements for a project. They're a useful way to get groups of stakeholders with different perspectives to come up with and share ideas.

Once groups of stakeholders have generated possible requirements, final decisions have to be made about which ones are in scope. This involves classifying and prioritizing necessary requirements, and rejecting ones that are determined to be out of scope. To do this, you can use group decision-making techniques.

There are two important observation techniques to consider:

1. job shadowing – Job shadowing is watching a person or group of people as they perform their job. This is especially useful for complicated processes or when the people who'll use a product or service find it difficult to clearly express their requirements.
2. participant observation – Being a participant observer means trying out a task or process yourself

A prototype is a working model of a product. You can create a prototype early in a project and let stakeholders use it to see how well it meets their needs. This is a much more concrete way to collect requirements than simply asking stakeholders what they need. Prototypes are the most useful if a project must deliver something people will use to complete tasks.

There are other techniques that do not require contact with users or decisions to be made in a group setting:

• benchmarking – involves studying how other organizations create similar products and identifying best practices and new innovations
• creating a context diagram – a model that shows the inputs and outputs of a system and all the people surrounding its use
• document analysis – studying documents such as business plans, marketing material, and issue logs to identify requirements

Project requirements are the basis for defining a project's scope and for planning and controlling project work, costs, time, and quality. They will depend on the required attributes of a product and the needs of the client. High-level project requirements are outlined in the project charter. Using the stakeholder register, you need to consult stakeholders to collect more detailed requirements. This is the purpose of the Collect Requirements process.

Tools and techniques you can use to collect project requirements include interviews, focus groups, facilitated workshops, and questionnaires and surveys. They also include group creativity techniques, group decision-making techniques, observation, prototypes, benchmarking, context diagrams, and document analysis.