How Does The Project Manager Make Sure The Business Requirements Are Right?

By Author: thomas galvin
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In a Project Managers Roles and Responsibilities it is normally written that they have responsibility to ensure the successful delivery of the project within time, cost and quality restraints, or words to that effect.
The Project Managers Role and Responsibility is to ensure that every task completed is done to the highest possible quality and completeness. One such task is developing the project requirements definition. Given that poor business requirements can be responsible for a failed project; how can a project manager ensure the exercise is carried out effectively?
It is not in the best interest of the Project Manager to be involved in and learn every minute detail. They need to be able to depend on their team to be across the detail so they don't have to be.
A few small tips that may help:

Your team should source as much existing material as possible, this is often a good way of knowing if you have covered all bases. Procedure manuals, structure charts, system architecture diagrams etc. Use those to help identify the areas that need analysis.

To be confident that the ...
... job is complete you need to know what is involved and that a thorough process is being carried out. You want your team to document with you the steps to be carried out, with whom or on what. So what systems and people will be assessed or interviewed and how.

Define and agree together what the outputs of the process will be, what they will contain and why they are needed. This not only helps you make sure they capture everything but makes them think about what they are going to use each output for.

Provide your team with information about your level of expectation of the outputs. Inspect what you expect so to speak and do it early. Continue to review until you are 100% happy.

Get knowledgeable people to review the information. Your team should not go out and gather information from people, put a document together and that's it. The business requirements must be reviewed by subject matter experts for completeness and correctness.

Make sure the review process is thorough, sending the document attached to an email is not enough. A walkthrough session should be booked where open discussion can take place as a result.

If you are working with figures, always have them validated by one or more people other than the person that put them together. Be involved in defining the validation process, checking the formulas in a spreadsheet is not likely to be a complete process. Assessing the source of the numbers may also be required.

Find Business Requirements and Project Managers Roles and Responsibilities related information at Projectcommunityonline.com