Who Decides the Project Requirements?

by - Nilesh Raje

I am sure most of us would agree that Every Project Has Requirements. Some requirements are crucial to the product, while others are gold-plated luxuries. Explicitly or implicitly, there is always someone from the project team who performs the role of requirements gathering for every software project. Determining the project requirements is vital in developing successful software as they form a baseline between the IT team, the customers and the stakeholders on what features will be delivered in the new system. One needs to identify at the beginning of the project who would be taking the ownership for defining the project requirements. If this is not resolved in the early stages of the project then the ownership falls on the development team by default or the requirements would form to be a part of the change request. The question still remains a journey to the unknown as to who would decide about the requirements on a software project. Reaching an agreement is ideal but it's practically impossible to keep the requirements on hold while waiting for every stakeholder to give his or her opinion on the issues concerned. Following are some of the suggested ways to handle the project requirements. Different users have different project requirements, decide which users and which requirements are more important to satisfy taking into consideration the end customer who would be using the developed product. Customer may not be always right. The customer has a viewpoint and one must understand and respect his viewpoints rather than forcing developers to determine among the customers who do not agree with conflicting project requirements. Customers sometimes believe that the development team should already know what the users need or defining business requirements is not the ownership of the customer but the development team. Requirements given by the marketing team at times conflict with what developers think they could build. The problem here is ve ry little input is provided from the marketing team while the developers have to define the product and find the requirement themselves.

It's better to identify in the early stages of the project who from the customer's end would take business decisions on project requirements so as go ahead smoothly with the next planned project activity.