Project Requirements: Know What You Need To Do

So far, we have listed our project goals, key milestones, risks, and a strawman project plan. These steps together are often what is called the “Inception Phase”, and includes everything to define what is trying to be done. Now comes the “Elaboration Phase.” This phase describes more about how your project will be conducted, and requires that you capture more detailed requirements from those involved.

Every project that I’ve been involved with, whether as a lead or simply a team member, has had requirements. Some projects didn’t document those requirements, causing finger pointing later on when misunderstandings surfaced. Other projects started before gathering requirements and didn’t count the cost or the time required. The projects that operated the best did both of these things: identified needs up front, and documented them. Here is a simple method for capturing requirements:

1. Interview each of your customers and stakeholders – find out what they are looking to be accomplished, as well as what is most important to them
2. Document these requirements using a spreadsheet, with columns such as “id”, “requirement”, “priority”
3. Prioritize the tasks based on your interview, using labels such as “must”, “should”, and “nice”
4. Organize each requirement by milestone by adding a new column call “milestone”
5. (Optional) Determine dependencies (task 2 requires task 1 to be complete) and capture it in a new column called “depends”

Keep in mind that a project’s requirements may change over time. The longer a project is, the more often that things will change – budgets, needs, timelines, team members, etc. This may force requirements to be moved out to future milestones or out of the plan entirely, so your requirements document will be a “living document” – one that changes over time. That is part of being an agile ministry, allowing change to be accepted and and allowing your ministry/project to remain relevant.

[tags]project management, project plans, requirements[/tags]

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