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The Importance of Requirements Traceability
November 10, 2008 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Project Management Best Practices, Quality Management, Requirements Management
The Importance of Requirements Traceability
By Craig Brown
Requirements traceability is an important part of requirements management.
It’s not a particularly glamorous part of the job, but it is crucial to complex projects in particular and good for all types of projects. Traceability helps you track what is happening to the project requirements, how and where they are addressed by solution and it helps manage those requirements that are not going to be fulfilled.
If you have ever been involved in project remediation then you’ll use the Traceability Matrix as your first point of auditing what has gone before. And usually you’ll discover that little or no traceability has been done, which drives up risk and remediation costs further as more time and effort is invested to understand the relationship between requirements, business need and the solution design.
Even when you are not intervening, but are simply managing your own project you are less likely to discover surprises such as omitted or mis-interpreted requirements if you employ this tool.
Requirements traceability is a very important aspect of quality management for projects. If you are a PM you should make sure one of your senior team members is assigned to the task and make sure it is reviewed by the whole project team at each major phase of the project. If you are a BA you should know the contents intimately and use it to anticipate issues and risks coming up, and to manage the expectations and behaviours of both stakeholders and the development team.
Craig Brown has worked as a project manager and business analyst mainly in the Australian ITC and the banking industries. He has also worked in the law, education and welfare industries, including starting a law firm. Craig now has a Master’s degree in project management from RMIT university, and is currently working with a Melbourne based IT consulting firm called OptimiseIT. Craig’s personal blog can be found at http://www.betterprojects.net/.
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