In my previous article, I looked at all that we need to know about risk management plans for projects. In this article, I want to look at all that you need to know about customer requirements for projects. Follow me as we are going to look at that together in this article.
As a project manager, you have to analyse the needs of the project stakeholders clear and authentic documentation of those needs will be critical to the project’s success.
If the stakeholders are not in agreement about project expectations, timelines, and costs, they will not be satisfied with the outcome of the project.
By determining the needs of the stakeholders, you can obtain a consensus and prevent misunderstandings on the requirements of varied stakeholders of the project.
A customer requirement is a requirement that documents the customers’ needs and expectations to meet the project objectives.
Some of the requirements criteria include conformance to specific standards, quality, functional interface, data, security, and control, content, technical, training, and performance support and deployment.
The requirements need to be elicited, analyzed, and recorded in sufficient detail from the customers to enable measurement during project execution.
The collected requirements form the basis for planning the cost, schedule and quality of the project.
Typical example…
Senior Management of a large firm decided o undertake the development of an e-commerce capability on their existing website.
When interviewing the customer, the project manager received a lot of requirements that were project-specific.
The project manager recorded the customer requirements in sufficient detail and ranked the requirements based on priority.
Because there was an increased demand for the product, the customer wanted the product to be delivered ahead of schedule. The project manager included this requirement in the existing list of customer requirements.
Project and product requirements
Requirements are further categorised into project requirements and product requirements, depending on the needs of the project.
Project requirements could typically include the business, project management, and delivery requirements of the project. Product requirements could typically include the technical, security, and performance requirements of the product.
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