Project Management Foundations: Requirements

Question 1

What are project requirements?

Answer 1

They are how we determine what the business needs and set out project goals.

Question 2

What is the key to effective requirements management?

Answer 2

Ask:

1. Who are our stakeholders?
2. What exactly do they want or need?
3. How important is each requirement?
4. How will we deal with conflicts, changes, surprises, and miscommunications?

Question 3

What are some formal standards to manage requirements?

Answer 3

1. The International Standards Organization ISO 21500, Guidance on Project Management
2. ISO, IEC, IEEE
3. MIL-STD-961E

Question 4

What is a requirements elicitation plan?

Answer 4

It describes what information you’re trying to gather and how you’re going to get it, i.e. interviews, group sessions, observation, or studying process documentation and analyzing business data.

Question 5

Why is creating the stakeholder list a good idea?

Answer 5

It’s a good way to make sure that you’re covering all of the people that need to be included in your requirements development.

Question 6

How will doing a stakeholder analysis help you?

Answer 6

First, it can help to ensure that you’re considering all of your stakeholders and how the project will affect them. Second, it can help you develop an effective plan for eliciting requirements from all of those stakeholders. Third, it can help you develop a communications plan so that you can keep your stakeholders engaged and informed as your project moves forward.

Question 7

What is an important part of requirements research?

Answer 7

To find out where all of the requirements are hiding and bring them out into plain sight by matching our data gathering techniques with our sources of information.

Question 8

When you collect requirements, you need to do what?

Answer 8

Capture information about each one, documenting their attributes.

Question 9

How does documenting attributes help?

Answer 9

It lets us build structure around the requirements that will form the basis for our project.

Question 10

What are the ten attributes?

Answer 10

1. Absolute reference
2. Complexity
3. Risk
4. Author
5. Source
6. Ownership
7. Stability
8. Urgency
9. Priority
10. State

Question 11

What is absolute reference?

Answer 11

This is the identification number for your requirement. Assigning a number makes it easier to track requirements over time even if the name or the description changes.

Question 12

What is complexity?

Answer 12

How difficult will it be to address the requirement? You might want to rate it somehow.

Question 13

What is risk?

Answer 13

How much uncertainty is there about the requirement? Do you feel like you really understand it?

Question 14

What is author?

Answer 14

Who documented or elicited the requirement.

Question 15

What is source?

Answer 15

Where did the information about the requirement come from?

Question 16

What is ownership?

Answer 16

Who is responsible for addressing the requiement?

Question 17

What is stability?

Answer 17

Is the requirement well-defined or does it seem like it may need to be modified or reviewed?

Question 18

What is urgency?

Answer 18

Does the requirement need to be addressed right away or is it something that can wait?

Question 19

What is priority?

Answer 19

How important is the requirement in relation to the entire project. Is it one that needs to be met in order for the project to be successful or is a nice-to-have feature that could be left out if necessary?

Question 20

What is state?

Answer 20

Is the requirement still being drafted or has it been fully documented and approved?

Question 21

What are use cases?

Answer 21

They provide the context they we need to develop good solutions. It tells the story of how the solutions should work once it’s complete. It provides a step by step explanation of a process and what everyone involved needs to do along the way.

Question 22

What are actors?

Answer 22

The people and systems involved in a use case.

Question 23

What are steps called in a use case?

Answer 23

Actions or events.

Question 24

For more complex use cases, what can you use?

Answer 24

A technique like unified modeling language or UML to diagram the process.

Question 25

What is a requirements report?

Answer 25

When you take all the information you gathered from stakeholders and use it to frame up a project. It starts with an executive summary, then there should be some background information to explain why the project is important for the business and who the stakeholders are. Next, we can have sections to discuss the goals for the project and the description of things that are in scope and out of scope. We can also describe the risks that we anticipate and any inter-dependencies with other projects in the organization.

Question 26

What is the key to documenting project requirements?

Answer 26

To describe what you want a solution to without explaining how to do it.

Question 27

What are three things to look for in each requirement?

Answer 27

First, is it clear and specific? Second, is it thorough? Third, is it testable?

Question 28

How do you make the transition from gathering information to actually working on a project?

Answer 28

By getting your requirements approved. Then you can create a plan and start allocating resources.

Question 29

The easiest way to track changes to the requirements is to have what?

Answer 29

A versioning process. 1. Process for submitting change requests 2. Process for having them reviewed and approved. If the change is approved then it needs to be incorporated into the requirements report (as a new version) and everyone needs to be notified.