Requirements Documentation

All requirements must be documented once they have been collected from the stakeholders and finalized with the customer or sponsor. Understanding the ‘real’ requirements is an advanced skill and trained business analysts may be needed for this purpose on a very large project with hundreds of stakeholders. 

There are several tests to make sure that the correct requirements have been captured, one test is the 3 c’s where all the requirements have to be clear, complete, and consistent (there are several other tests). 

Proper requirements documentation must contain the stakeholder acceptance criteria. Requirements have to be aligned with the project objectives so ‘balancing stakeholder needs’ becomes a crucial art and a science for the PM to master. Requirements can also be ranked by order of priority if tradeoffs have to be made later during the project execution.