Collect Requirements is part of the “Scope Management” Knowledge Area, and is part of the “Planning” Process Group.
Collect Requirements is the process of determining, documenting, and managing stakeholder needs and requirements to meet project objectives. The key benefit of this process is that it provides the basis for defining and managing the project scope including product scope.
The project’s success is directly influenced by active stakeholder involvement in the discovery and decomposition of needs into requirements and by the care taken in determining, documenting, and managing the requirements of the product, service, or result of the project. Requirements include conditions or capabilities that are to be met by the project or present in the product, service, or result to satisfy an agreement or other formally imposed specification. Requirements include the quantified and documented needs and expectations of the sponsor, customer, and other stakeholders. These requirements need to be elicited, analyzed, and recorded in enough detail to be included in the scope baseline and to be measured once project execution begins. Requirements become the foundation of the WBS. Cost, schedule, quality planning, and sometimes procurement are all based upon these requirements. The development of requirements begins with an analysis of the information contained in the project charter, the stakeholder register and the stakeholder management plan.
Many organizations categorize requirements into different types, such as business and technical solutions, the former referring to stakeholder needs and the latter as to how those needs will be implemented. Requirements can be grouped into classifications allowing for further refinement and detail as the requirements are elaborated.
These classifications include:
- Business requirements, which describe the higher-level needs of the organization as a whole, such as the
business issues or opportunities, and reasons why a project has been undertaken. - Stakeholder requirements, which describe needs of a stakeholder or stakeholder group.
- Solution requirements, which describe features, functions, and characteristics of the product, service, or result that will meet the business and stakeholder requirements. Solution requirements are further grouped into functional and nonfunctional requirements:
- Functional requirements describe the behaviors of the product. Examples include processes, data, and interactions with the product.
- Nonfunctional requirements supplement functional requirements and describe the environmental conditions or qualities required for the product to be effective. Examples include: reliability, security, performance, safety, level of service, supportability, retention/purge, etc.
- Transition requirements describe temporary capabilities, such as data conversion and training
requirements, needed to transition from the current “as-is” state to the future “to-be” state. - Project requirements, which describe the actions, processes, or other conditions the project needs
to meet. - Quality requirements, which capture any condition or criteria needed to validate the successful completion of a project deliverable or fulfillment of other project requirements.
This definition was found in the PMBOK V5
Go back to the Glossary or to the Mapping
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Collect Requirements has:
Inputs:
- Project charter
- Requirements management plan
- Scope management plan
- Stakeholder management plan
- Stakeholder register
Outputs:
- Requirements documentation
- Requirements Traceability Matrix
Tools and techniques:
- Benchmarking
- Context diagrams
- Document analysis
- Facilitated workshops
- Focus groups
- Group creativity techniques
- Group decision-making techniques
- Interviews
- Observations
- Prototypes
- Questionnaires and surveys
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