Scope & Requirements

PPM helps you manage the following 3 most important aspects of your project scope:

• Ensure project team members clearly understand stakeholders’ requirements and stakeholders and team members reach consent on how to validate each requirement when it is done. After the consent is documented in test cases, the requirement is marked as a “testable requirement” which is associated with test cases.
• Allow traceability from stakeholders to requirements, activities and test cases.
• Provide baseline and change management features for changes of requirements.

Scope Management

PPM helps you manage your project requirements, activities, deliverables, budgets, and deadlines. While it is possible that things can change, having the project scope defined in the beginning can definitely make it easier for you to manage and run the project, including dealing with the changes. PPM allows you to do the following:

• Collect, specify and number requirements 
• Define scope details (deliverables, activities, dependencies, test cases and resources)
• Create a work breakdown structure (WBS)
• Verify scope (reviewing deliverables and test cases with customers)
• Control scope (all requested changes going through the pre-defined change control process)

Baseline Management

PPM allows you to baseline the entire scope (entire WBS) of your project. By setting it in stone, you and your client can get a full view of the project from beginning to end. One of the best results of establishing a good baseline is that everyone related to the project will have the same expectations from the project and the project team. The baseline helps to communicate those expectations. By communicating the baseline and getting approval of the baseline, you can set the expectations of the client and the stakeholders involved with the project.

Traceability Management

One of the most important aspects of requirement management is traceability. Tracing allows you to understand why the requirement exists, the impact of change, whether the set of requirements is complete, and helps prioritize requirements.

The above diagram shows how traceability in PPM starts with the business requirements’ outcomes/benefits and traces through the stakeholder requirements, solution requirements, supplementary requirements/nonfunctional, and down into testing scenarios and test cases. It is critically important to understand how they relate back up to the top.