Requirements Management: Definition, Details, Steps And Tips

Updated 29 September 2022

The Indeed Editorial Team comprises a diverse and talented team of writers, researchers and subject matter experts equipped with Indeed's data and insights to deliver useful tips to help guide your career journey.

Throughout the product development process, it is often important for an organisation to meet business and stakeholder requirements. To achieve this, some businesses have a system for managing these requirements, which involves defining the requirements of a project and ranking them based on their contributions towards achieving long-term business objectives. Understanding the requirements management process can help you and the organisation improve product quality and team communication. In this article, we define requirements management, explain its stages, components and types and provide steps to help manage requirements during a project and share tips to help you ensure efficiency.

What Is Requirements Management?

Organisations use requirements management to help ensure their processes align with relevant project requirements. These strategies apply throughout a project's lifecycle and adapt to new requirements and changes. They are also integral to project management and contribute to a company's product development strategy.

Typically, project and product managers are responsible for managing project requirements, which are the functions, specifications and tasks that complete it successfully. Project requirements incorporate a variety of attributes, with the key characteristic being specificity, which enables you to define distinct objectives. When defining a project's objectives, scope, resources and milestones, you can consider these requirements.

Stages Of Managing Project Requirements

The following are some common stages of managing project requirements:

Collection

The collection phase involves gathering, identifying, documenting and managing the pertinent requirements, which depend on the project's characteristics. At this stage, most processes of managing project requirements consider the demands of stakeholders, but it is also important to address business and user requirements. You can use various techniques to determine these requirements when interacting with the relevant parties. These methods include interviews, observations, workshops, surveys, questionnaires, prototypes, context diagrams, benchmarks and document analysis.

Analysis

Analysis involves interpreting the collected data to determine the most effective strategies for meeting the applicable requirements. This phase of the process includes developing prototypes and evaluating their interaction with existing requirements. You can also categorise requirements for more effective analyses. Categorising allows you to group similar requirements and apply identical resolution strategies. For example, you can categorise requirements based on whether they apply to the functional, operational or transitional requirements of a product or project. This phase also helps determine how requirements align with a team's skills and long-term objectives.

Definition

This phase allows you to apply the requirements you have collected and analysed to define the objectives for the project. In defining requirements, it is possible to establish project estimates, conduct risk assessments and set deadlines. You can consider documenting the results of this phase because you can use them to create user stories, maps and personas. It is also possible to export such documents into tools or software for managing requirements.

Prioritisation

The success of most projects and project management techniques depends on how well they manage limited resources. Prioritising project requirements and allocating resources according to those priorities is important due to the shortage of pertinent resources. To help ensure that prioritisation measures are successful, you can check that the use of these resources meets key requirements. Though your experience is helpful at this stage, working with users, stakeholders and customers can also be beneficial. Their advice can help you create alternatives and prioritise effectively.

Validation

Validation involves assessing management procedures to help ensure they adhere to specifications. This stage may occur once or several times throughout the process of managing project requirements. If a project is complex and has many requirements, validation becomes necessary at various stages. After ensuring compliance with requirements, you can certify various project stages and use this certification to set milestones.

Components Of Project Requirements

Project requirements are the tasks or conditions a company considers when conducting product research, design and implementation. Usually, a business makes these decisions based on its operations or clientele. The following are some common components of project requirements:

Specifying details: Companies emphasise the importance of providing all the key details that help to clearly state objectives when creating project requirements.
Conducting tests: Companies can meet and evaluate project requirements by conducting tests, such as user acceptance tests.
Writing clearly: Organisations write project requirements so that everyone can easily understand them. This way, all team members are clear about the requirements and can act upon them.
Describing accurately: Effective project requirements accurately and precisely describe any needs or difficulties an end user may have when using a specific product or service.
Researching viability: Organisations conduct research on the project requirements to determine if it is viable and beneficial for achieving its objectives.

Benefits Of Managing Requirements

Managing requirements is important for a company's product development process, as it helps reduce errors by recording the changes to each requirement. It also enables teams to maintain constant communication with stakeholders throughout a project and ensures a thorough understanding of all the project's tasks. The following are some benefits of managing requirements:

Better product quality
Timely project delivery
Lower project costs
Control over project scope
Greater consistency
Efficient collaboration

Types Of Project Requirements

The following are some types of project requirements to consider when implementing effective strategies for managing requirements:

User requirements

User requirements outline the demands of consumers and how they may interact with a product or feature. These usually address a particular challenge or issue that consumers face, such as expensive subscriptions. Besides focusing on how a product can enhance the consumer's experience, user requirements enable an organisation to define the reason behind its product's creation. Organisations describe these user requirements in a user story or a document.

Examples of user requirements may include providing more diversity in subscription options, supplying the correct contact information for customer service to help replace lost or damaged products and packaging products securely for better delivery.

Business requirements

Generally, stakeholders establish the objectives of an organisation. These objectives help a company to achieve its larger goal and ensure customer satisfaction. Typically, a company outlines objectives in its business plan or model. Examples of business requirements may include adding instructions on a product in various languages, making manuals for a product and creating multicultural buyer personas.

System requirements

System requirements define a product's capabilities and evaluate its usability. These are technical objectives that include a system's availability, efficiency and quality. Organisations usually outline the system requirements within a product requirements document or software requirements specification. Examples of system requirements may include providing various subscription costs, quick loading times and free storage on network devices.

How To Manage Requirements During A Project

The following are some steps you can consider to manage requirements effectively throughout a project:

1. Identify your project stakeholders

Prior to managing your requirements, it is important to identify the project's stakeholders. Their purchases contribute to the company's revenue. Consider your project's principal investors and customers when identifying its stakeholders.

2. Gather your requirements

After identifying the stakeholders, try to determine their requirements. There are several methods for collecting requirements, which vary based on the types of stakeholders. Some of these strategies include interviewing consumers, conducting questionnaires, devising innovative ideas, providing prototypes for product testing and using context diagrams where you define the product's steps for users.

3. Review and prioritise your requirements

The next step in effectively managing requirements is comparing the alignment of the collected requirements with the business objectives. Then, you can prioritise these based on the organisation's method. This may involve focusing solely on those requirements that relate to the mission of the business.

4. Execute your plan

After prioritising your requirements, consider creating and executing a plan. You can share your documentation of the requirements with stakeholders to get their approval. Then, you can assign roles and initiate work on activities that can help you meet these requirements. You can manage your requirements by monitoring your project's progress and by evaluating any new requirements that may emerge.

Tips For Managing Project Requirements

The following are some tips you can consider to help ensure you manage the project requirements effectively:

Use tools to manage requirements: Consider using collaborative project management software and tools to manage requirements when completing a project. These tools can help store and share essential information about your requirements.
Establish a process for changing requirements: Consider developing steps for processing requirement changes to accommodate alterations or any unanticipated requirements that may arise.
Perform risk analysis: You can also prepare for potential problems by performing a risk assessment and developing responses for when these events occur.