Why is Requirements Management Functionality Important?

Requirements exist within all projects. Requirements are simply a capability needed by stakeholders to deliver a product and/or service.  Requirements Management is an iterative set of activities that help ensure that elicitation, documentation, refinement, and changes of requirements is adequately dealt with during a lifecycle, with a view toward satisfying the overall mission or need in a quality manner and to the customers’ satisfaction.

Typical requirements process involves the following:

- Identify stakeholders
- Gather/elicit requirements
- Analyze requirements
- Specify/document requirements
- Baseline requirement groups (verify, validate, and prioritize requirements- i.e.: agree and sign-off on requirements)
- Communicate requirements
- Monitor/track requirements
- Manage and control changes to requirements
- Report requirements compliance

You need to have a process that pulls together the steps and manage them properly.
 
Modern project management software such as 8Manage PM provides requirements management features to help you on the following:

- Managing requirement version and content changes
- Storing requirement attributes
- Linking requirements to other system elements
- Providing multiple views of groups of requirements based on their attribute values
- Monitoring the state of each requirement or groups of requirements
- Controlling access to requirements and therefore, preventing unauthorized changes
- Facilitating the communication of requirements to requirement stakeholders

The requirements management functionality of your project management tool can help you provide multiple views to user groups of requirements. You may have a particular stakeholder or project manager that needs a regular report or a regular understanding of where their requirements are at. This may be for a subcomponent of a project or the entire project, and he/she may need to know which requirements are waiting to be approved, who are they waiting to be approved by, and how many requirements have been deferred this week.

Since requirements changes will trigger project plan changes, using integrated requirements and project management functionality provided by modern project management software such as 8Manage PM is better than using separate tools.