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The Requirements Management Plan
What is the requirements management plan? It’s a component of the project management plan, and it describes how project and product requirements will be analyzed, documented and managed.
Basically it’s the process that we’re going to go through to gather these requirements and then manage them and track them, to ensure that we’re delivering on those customer requirements right up to the end when we finish delivering the project.
With the rise of the business analyst role, almost every project will have a business analyst and many organizations will refer to this requirements management plan as the business analysis plan.
Because we’re describing the process of how we’re gathering these requirements and then tracking them there are a few different things that can go into our requirements management plan. Don’t forget with any plan we can make it small – it can be simple like just a couple of lines in an overall document, or if it’s a large project and there’s a lot of people involved and there’s a lot of stakeholders and it really needs to be spelled out, it could be a document of its own. And that could go into your project management plan. As long as it covers off these things in general usually you’re pretty safe.
Things required in a Requirements Management Plan
So how are we going to track and find these requirements? How are we going to report on them? How are we going to initiate changes, and how will those impacts be analyzed? How will the requirements be traced tracked and reported on, to make sure that we are delivering to our customer at the end and that they’re happy. What authorization levels are required to approve any changes? (This will tie in with our configuration management plan for any documents that will be baselined).
Requirements prioritization, how do we prioritize them? Are they based on business value? Who does that, who decides and the metrics that will be used for rationale? This helps get everyone on the same page. Are we going for speed in a process? Are we going for cost reduction? Whatever it is it’s good to write it down so that everyone is on the same page.
Lastly one of the most important things, the traceability structure. This reflects the requirement attributes captured on the requirements traceability matrix. In other words the traceability matrix is a separate document to this that will tie into it and show us how we’ve got our requirements and how they are actually related to the scope, and ultimately the items that we’re delivering. There needs to be a clear line, clearly shown, which is why it’s in a matrix format. You’ve got your requirements down the side and as it goes along it shows how they’re relating to the scope that you’re delivering. And that rounds out the details you will find in a Requirements Management Plan.
– David McLachlan