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Requirements Analysis in Projects: Analyzing Stakeholder Needs for More Satisfying Outcomes

A Gallup poll shows that 3 in 5 (around 59 percent) of American employees who’ve been operating remotely amid COVID would like to continue working virtually once pandemic restrictions ease. Forty-one percent would rather go back to their offices.

But while some workplace approaches will change, some project management principles must remain intact.

For instance, a project only achieves its purpose if it meets client demands in full. Punctual completion and adherence to budgets are partial indicators of project success. Your venture isn’t successful until stakeholders are happy with the outcome.

If you don’t impress them, you have failed no matter how much effort you’ve put into the project.

So whether you are moving to a remote workforce approach post-pandemic or resuming an in-house approach, it’s important to plan to meet all shareholder requirements. It is a critical component of project management that must be monitored throughout the project phase and not left for the program’s end.

To achieve a desirable deliverable, you must conduct a requirements analysis and understand all their needs before embarking on the project.

The best PMs analyze stakeholder requirements to see if they will be catered for in the set of activities included in the plan. They conduct requirements and make up for any inadequacies upfront.

What Happens During Requirements Analysis?

Before defining Requirements Analysis, let’s start by understanding what requirements are. The Business Analysis Body of Knowledge defines need in three ways:

1. A condition or result expected by a stakeholder to meet a goal or solve a problem.
2. A condition or achievement that must be met or possessed by a solution or solution component to satisfy a contract, standard, specification, or other formally imposed documents.
3. A documented representation of a condition or capability as in (1) and (2).

In a nutshell, it refers to what must be implemented and the expected result.

According to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge, requirement analysis, therefore, refers to the process of evaluating stakeholder project requirements to understand their expectations. Requirement analysis involves going through the client’s requests and planning to meet them while checking and weeding out any contradicting requirements.

Any manager can conduct this assessment as long as the requirements are;

• Listed in an official document
• Practical
• Complete
• Assessable
• Instantly recognizable
• Measurable
• Not in conflict with each other

The Project Requirement Analysis Process

It refers to the process of going through a client’s requirements and assessing them to fit into your set of activities. The PM has to identify, analyze, and record these requirements.

A PM should start by gathering documents highlighting requirements and interviewing clients on project needs.

Secondly, you need to evaluate these needs to check whether they make sense, are practical, understandable, and clear-cut.

Step three is to record these needs.

Here’s more insight into what each component entails.

Step 1: Requirements

You cannot analyze what you don’t know, so start by gathering documents highlighting requirements and interviewing clients on project needs.

You can use the help of the project charter, the credential that specifies all objectives. Though this official document generalizes the project objectives, step 1 focuses on the clients and why they need the project accomplished, and its goals.

Step 2: Do an Analysis

Step 2 can only be useful if step 1 was conducted accurately. A correct and helpful analysis begins with the accurate identification of a client’s needs.

That’s why you want to double-check everything requirement you come up with to confirm if it, without a doubt, reflects what your stakeholders want.

Requirements analysis can gauge the practicality of the needs and put it side by side with the project plan.

As mentioned earlier, the requirements must be precise, complete, instantly recognizable, and not in conflict with each other.

This is also the stage to fix and discuss any issues noticed before proceeding to the next step.

Step 3: Record Project Requirements

Because this entire process is meant to help, a project team gather insights on what a client needs, it only makes sense to record your findings.

This data will prove useful in many ways. Apart from helping you tweak your project plan to accommodate all client needs, it can also measure success per the client’s definition.

Step 4: Review of Recorded Requirements

This fourth step is as important as the first three. This final stage involves reviewing everything you’ve recorded in your project requirements document and seeing if you can improve the process moving forward.

This phase is important because it exposes mistakes you might have missed in the analysis and recording phase. It is also the time to notice any inadequacies in your project plan and make tweaks to ensure all client needs are met.

Tools and Techniques to Manage Project Requirements

Well, identifying stakeholder requirements is one thing; staying on top of these needs and meeting them is another!

That’s why you must leverage some tools and techniques to manage your stakeholder’s needs and ensure each of them is met as planned.

A manager can choose from a wide range of techniques. An excellent idea is to utilize flowcharts to gain perfect visibility into the flow of activities.

That way, the requirements can be clearly understood and tracked by every team member to smooth the process of satisfying client needs.

Gantt charts are also a smart way to analyze the accomplishment of stakeholder requirements. They also offer a manager visibility into the project by revealing tasks as planned throughout a project’s life.

This kind of visibility allows you to monitor how planned activities will lead to stakeholder requirements’ satisfaction.

 Use Project Management Software

Project management platforms are built to streamline processes for managers. The best solutions help PMs in conducting requirements analysis.

These tools allow you to add requirements as you gather them from clients into the platform and tie each to a particular activity. You can also make changes to your schedules as more client requirements flow in.

PMs can also attach all documents needed and include side notes and comments so that you can fix any concerns about requirements during task completion.

Besides linking different tasks to requirements, project management tools have Gantt charts that allow a PM to stay on top of client needs.

These charts are particularly helpful for sorting out dependent tasks. They make it easier to deal with activity dependencies reducing the chances of leaving teams unoccupied or making other related mistakes.

 Communicating Client Requirements for Swift Team Action

Punctual completion and adherence to budgets are partial indicators of project success. Your venture isn’t successful until stakeholders are happy with the outcome.

If you don’t impress them, you have failed no matter how much effort you’ve put into the project.

But conducting requirement analysis to determine clients’ needs is just the start of it. After learning everything stakeholders need, a project manager must pass on the information for team implementation.

Poor communication of stakeholder requirements can affect project outcomes and lead to half-met needs.

Managers must first understand client needs and then break them down for easy understanding and team action without leaving out any important details.

Effective communication of stakeholder requirements is essential in ensuring the team works towards meeting client needs.

Again, the challenge doubles for remote teams prone to communication breakdowns due to long-distance relationships.

PMs want to leverage virtual meeting video tools like Zoom to expound further on client needs. And because the client needs to change with time, you want to maintain an active feedback cycle to ensure both sides are up to speed.

In a nutshell, the project manager acts as this very important middle guy who collects info on client needs, breaks it down, and communicates it to a team of experts to act upon it.

Final Words

Whether you are moving to a remote workforce approach post-pandemic or resuming an in-house approach, it’s important to plan to meet all shareholder requirements. It is a critical component of project management that must be monitored throughout the project phase and not left for the program’s end.

Punctual completion and adherence to budgets are only partial indicators of project success. Your venture isn’t successful until stakeholders are happy with the outcome.

If you don’t impress them, you have failed no matter how much effort you’ve put into the project.

So whether you are moving to a remote workforce approach post-pandemic or resuming an in-house approach, it’s important to plan to meet all shareholder requirements.

Satisfying stakeholders is a critical component of project management and must be monitored throughout the project phase and not left for the program’s end.

When conducting requirements analysis, remember the following processes; identify the needs, analyze them, verify them and, finally, make most project management software to manage these requirements.