Project Requirements: A Guide to Best Practices

CHAPTER1

Introduction

When all is said and done, project success comes down to project performance: cost, schedule, and quality. Adopting requirements-shaping practices can greatly improve your project’s probability of success. Additional investment in understanding user requirements early in the project, before you initiate other technical work, will reduce the amount of rework that must be performed. In fact, the reduced rework will pay for any additional costs associated with improving the requirements process!

Granted, this investment needs to be made early, and recouping it will take time. But proceeding without knowing what users really require is asking for problems and, rest assured, will incur added costs for rework. The project manager ...