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A Project Management Primer - Scope - Requirements Capture - Introduction
March 19, 2008 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Requirements Management, Scope Management
A Project Management Primer - Scope - Requirements Capture - Introduction (#15 in the Hut A Project Management Primer)
By Nick Jenkins
Requirements capture is the process of harvesting the raw requirements of your stakeholders and turning them into something useful. It is essentially the interrogation of stakeholders to determine their needs. This can take many forms, with questionnaires or interviews being the most popular. The usual output is a ‘requirements specification’ document which details which of the stakeholder requirements the project will address and, importantly, which it will not.
The focus in requirements capture must be in gathering of information. Keep your ears open and your mouth shut! Listen carefully to what people want before you start designing your product. Later you can focus on how things are to be achieved for now you need to find out what must be achieved.
In reality this is difficult to achieve. Technical people complain that stakeholders often “don’t know what they want”. This is not true. Stakeholders know exactly what they want – they want less hassle, easier jobs and so on. The problem is that they can’t design the system for you, they can’t tell you how to achieve what they want. The trick in requirements specification is to take what the stakeholders give you and distil it into something you can use to help you make decisions on how to implement their wishes. One way to think of this is as finding the ideal solution to the stakeholder’s current problems.
Requirements capture also needs to be fast. Projects have a tendency to bog down at this stage and to produce reams of documentation, but no useful output. Requirements capture should not produce endless tomes detailing the answer to every possible question but should provide enough clarity for the project team so that the objectives are clear.
Next in the Hut A Project Management Primer:
A Project Management Primer - Scope - Requirements Capture - Questionnaires
Previously in the Hut A Project Management Primer:
A Project Management Primer - Scope - Requirements - Stakeholders
Nick Jenkins is an IT manager with 10 years experience in software development, project management and software testing. He’s worked in various fields of IT development in Australia, Britain and the USA and occasionally he learned something along the way. Now he lives on the banks of the Swan River in Perth, Western Australia, and he publishes the odd guide to help aspiring IT professionals. Nick’s website can be found at www.nickjenkins.net.
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