One of the first questions you will be expected to ask when you get a new project and for PMP Certification purposes is, “What are the requirements?” Another way of asking this is, “What do you need? What do you want? What conditions have to be met for you to be satisfied?”
Requirement. A condition or capability that is required to be present in a product, service or result to satisfy a contract or other formally imposed specification. Requirements include the quantified and documented needs, wants, and expectations of the sponsor, customer, and other stakeholders.
Collect Requirements. The process of determining, documenting, and managing stakeholder needs and requirements to meet the project objectives.
You can group or categorize requirements however it makes sense for your project. Some examples of requirements categories include
Solution requirements, such as functional and nonfunctional requirements. Nonfunctional requirements include reliability, supportability, performance, and so forth.
Stakeholder requirements, such as communication and reporting requirements.
Project requirements, such as business or project management requirements.
Quality requirements that define the conductions that need to be met for the end result to be acceptable.
While you collect requirements, you should also determine how to prove that they are met. Make sure that all requirements are quantifiable. In other words, stating that you want “the employee hiring process to work better” isn’t quantifiable. Comparatively, stating that you want “the process reduced from 16 steps to 7 steps” is quantifiable. Stating that you want “the new process to be 40% faster” is also quantifiable.
Stakeholders are the sources of requirements, so you need to start with your stakeholder register. Some people also document high-level requirements or expectations — such as “improve employee productivity by 20%,” or “the new system needs to be easy to maintain” — in the stakeholder register. If this is the case for your project, you can progressively elaborate the high-level requirements into detailed requirements in this process.
You may document how you are going to manage stakeholder engagement in a stakeholder management plan — for example, you may manage external stakeholders differently than internal stakeholders, or you may collect requirements from technical stakeholders differently than business stakeholders.
You also need to have your project charter. The charter describes the justification for the project and should include high-level requirements.
The scope management plan and requirements management plan developed in the previous process provide guidance in eliciting requirements to develop the product scope.
Using information from your charter, stakeholder register, and various management plans, you can begin gathering and documenting project requirements. During this process, you transition from the high-level business requirements that you documented in the charter to detailed requirements for the product and project.