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Did you know?
– Only 26% of all projects succeed
– That 39% of projects fail due to a lack of planning
While bad project management comes with an enormous price tag, the costs aren’t always just financial. There is also the loss of life and material loss.
These statistics are shocking and there are various reasons for this.

One of the reasons is that managers simply don’t know what is required by their project. They make assumptions about the needs and requirements. They don’t have a clue who all the stakeholders are. They don’t consider the business reasons for the project.
Poor requirements management processes (or lack of thereof) have been identified as a leading cause of project failure.

Not meeting client needs

New or revised services and products are created in response to a business need. Too often we find ourselves in situations where, despite spending tremendous time and resources, there’s a mismatch between what has been designed and what is actually needed.

If some clients complained that what you delivered isn’t what was ordered or someone changed his mind about a deliverable halfway through the project then you know the requirements for the project has not been defined properly. Sometimes there are conflicting requirements from several clients. You just thought you completed a product and then received new requirements.

You must define what is needed

A proper requirements analysis can help you avoid the problems mentioned above. To get what you want, you need to accurately define it – and a good requirements analysis helps you achieve this objective.
A good requirements analysis will ensure that you satisfy the real needs of project stakeholders. The requirements are also traced to the external business needs and the internal strategic plan of the organization.

If you want to make planning easier for yourself invest in project management templates from Method 123. It covers all the important issues and serves as a complete reference with tips and hints to guide you in line with worldwide standards.

A good systematic process

A proper requirements analysis is done by following a good systematic process. You must be able to identify all the important stakeholders and make sure that you inquire about their needs for the project. Stakeholders may come from diverse groupings, some of them against your proposed project.

There are two types of requirements namely project requirements and product requirements that you must address. The one is about running the project successfully and the product about a useful service or product.

Essential steps

There are a number of essentials steps that you must take before doing the requirements analysis:

• You must know what you want to achieve with the project. What are the main objectives and purpose of what you want to achieve? With requirements analysis, we are still doing project definition. After that, we will do the scope of the project because we have a much clearer idea of the needs and requirements. Once you have performed the requirements analysis the possible solutions to satisfy the different stakeholders are much clearer.
• A good requirements analysis will also enable us to assess the viability of the project and identify the risks involved before making a “go-no go” decision for the project.
• Requirements are capabilities that a product must meet to satisfy a user’s need to solve a problem. The user’s needs can come from a number of sources including compliance with a standard or to legal regulations, a business need, a business problem or a market need.
• Requirements set the scope in any project. Completion of the product scope is measured against the product requirements. While including more than the stated requirements in the product scope is not recommended, providing anything less than the user-stated requirements do not meet user expectations.
• Requirement issues should be addressed very early in the project life cycle because design problems based on poor requirements lead to design issues that are more difficult and expensive to resolve after project development is well underway. We have learned in this article that proper resource requirement analysis is an important prerequisite for a successful project.

Free Step by step requirements analysis tutorial

I have written a step by step requirements analysis tutorial that will provide you with the process to write a proper requirements analysis. You can download it here.