Business Analysts have to continuously manage requirements when they are working on a change.
Requirements Management is a continuous set of activities that help to ensure that business requirements are properly managed throughout the project’s lifecycle.
A requirement is a business need that needs to be fulfilled.
Why do you need to Manage Requirements ?
Requirement Management helps to improve the project’s success by reducing the project’s risk and enabling effective scope management.
When do you plan requirements management?
Requirements management is a continuous activity that should be performed throughout the project’s lifecycle.
It is better to plan for requirements management during the strategic planning phase of the project to ensure that it is built into the project plan.
What is the Requirements Management Plan (RMP) ?
The requirements management plan is used to manage the project’s requirement and it usually includes the following information:
- Stakeholder roles and responsibilities defined by the RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed) matrix.
- The Requirements management process which is : elicited, analyzed, documented, verified and validated.
- The Requirements type definition and naming convention
- Requirements type or artifact mapping
- Requirements prioritization
- Requirements traceability
- Requirements versioning
- Requirements requirements change control process
- Requirements management tools
- Communication plan
Who is responsible for creating the requirements management plan ?
The Business Analysts is usually responsible for creating and managing the requirements management plan with input from the project manager.
How do you create a requirements management plan ?
Before you start creating your requirements management plan, you should have some information such as:
- How will you identify stakeholders ?
- How will you identify stakeholder requirements?
- How will you prioritize these requirements?
- Who will be responsible for the requirements management?
- How will you manage the requirements traceability?
- How will changes to requirements be managed?
Once you have this information then you can start working on the requirements management plan.
As written earlier, the requirements management plan gets some of its information from the project plan and this information includes the project scope and stakeholder identification.